[Raukodraug]

First off, let me begin with a big Happy New Year's to everyone. With any luck everyone has made it through 2007... and more importantly New Year's Eve... safe and sound.

As we enter into 2008, I have some announcements that I wold like to share.

First off, the chat functions of the website are back up and running thanks to considerable work from Tuxz0r. Not only has he created a dedicated chat room for the forums, he has also written a dice rolling program, Dicebot, that lives in the chat room. For information about logging into the chat room, check out the FAQs page. Dicebot is still in the testing phase, but, for basic info on using it, log into the chatroom and type "/msg dicebot help". Dicebot will give you the instructions you need. In the near future we hope to run a Play-by-Chat game in the chatroom to test the capabilities of dicebot. Keep on the lookout for more information about the chatroom and dicebot over the next few weeks.

Second, to help our forums grow, we need to get out there and do some advertising. On that note, I wanted to let everyone know that a new flyer for Gateway Gamer will be posted on Friday. There will be a couple of different variations (full sheet, half sheet, and quarter sheet), and I'm asking that everyone print off a couple of copies and post them on bulletin boards at your local gaming shops, comic shops, bookstores, sandwich shops... heck, any place that has a community bulletin board. The more active members we have, the easier it will be to build a real community of gamers and keep the boards a lively place for discussion, Play-By-Post gaming, and even Play-By-Chat gaming.

Last but not least, I also wanted to let everyone know that the admins and mods are working behind the scenes to plan for some upcoming projects for the site. The most substantial of these is a new user leveling system that we home to have in place sometime this spring. There will be more information about these projects over the next few months.

So, I hope that 2008 is a wonderful year for all of our members, and an equally wonderful year for the Gateway Gamer Community and Forums.

[tuxz0r]

Just a note on the IRC chat at the moment, which is currently not working. I should have this back up tonight, but in the meantime you can connect via this site: http://cgiirc.blitzed.org/irc.cgi and just connect to the #gatewaygamer channel and put in your nick name. Or, if you're familiar with IRC, just use your own IRC client and chat away.

I'll post a reply to this when it's fixed and working. Thanks.

[tuxz0r]

Ok, it's all up and working again. If you encounter IRC Chat problems via this site, please put post under "Trouble Tickets" in the Administrative Forums. Thanks!