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NARC 2 is up and running. You can submit, rate, and comment: other stuff will be added, time permitting.

http://narc.xen.prgmr.com/

But it's not getting much use. One map in the past week, that sort of thing. There are a couple of reasons: NUMA imports aren't happening, people don't know about it, but really there just aren't that many people still playing N these days. It's an old game. But with N 2.0, there still remains the crazy chance that this community will somehow once again become a gaming community. I think that'd be great.

The server bill is due. The server bill is due last week. I haven't received donations from anyone.

If there isn't interest in keeping the site running, I'm not going to keep it running. The bill is $43.20, every six months, which is not really too much of a problem for me, or for several of the other job-having members of the community, but I don't want to cover the bill myself, nor do I want any one person cover the entire bill. Donations of $5 would be fine. $15 would be amazing. $1 is still something. What I really want is to know that people still actually want this to happen, so I'm hoping several people will donate. If I can get the whole bill and nobody donates more than $5, that would be awesome.

Donations may be made via paypal to [email protected]

Hey scythe, i would help with the bill, but you know, i have no idea what paypal is ('cause i'm 15), i have like $240 in my bank, or something which is awesome (this is gonna be a noob post) but just wondering if when the bill gets paid that we can import again? I would use NARC more often if all my maps were there, i have actually just decided to start using it more often, today

Although it would be nice to have a darker color for the background of the site & some more words on it

I submitted my best map ever here and it disappeared, so I've kinda been holding a grudge against it.

It's pretty late, quick post and then bed.

I split the bill with scythe last time. I got on incluye pretty often on IRC to keep updating and editing and whatnot. He did. Site works. I figured $20 wasn't all that much to gamble that the community would shift over to NARC. But it didn't. More maps are being submitted to NUMA, which is up roughly 5% of the time, than to NARC. That is idiotic. NUMA is dead. Reviewers submit once a week, apparently (someone told me this -- I haven't actually caught NUMA up in several weeks). No one's moderated shit in ages. NARC, on the other hand, is functional. It's not NUMA, it's not familiar, but it's the exact same fucking thing + a web dev.

scythe: the reason I haven't sent you money this time around is that it's a sinkhole. I wanted evidence that the site was worth paying for, and I just don't think it is right now. Probably not ever. It really sucks that incluye wasted so much time pro bono for you guys ... maybe he can put NARC on his resume some day. But if the same people who were submitting a few thousand maps a month to NUMA before it went down aren't going to submit even a tenth of that to NARC, take it down. No point paying for nothing.

centerƒire wrote:I split the bill with scythe last time. I got on incluye pretty often on IRC to keep updating and editing and whatnot. He did. Site works. I figured $20 wasn't all that much to gamble that the community would shift over to NARC. But it didn't. More maps are being submitted to NUMA, which is up roughly 5% of the time, than to NARC. That is idiotic. NUMA is dead. Reviewers submit once a week, apparently (someone told me this -- I haven't actually caught NUMA up in several weeks). No one's moderated shit in ages. NARC, on the other hand, is functional. It's not NUMA, it's not familiar, but it's the exact same fucking thing + a web dev.

scythe: the reason I haven't sent you money this time around is that it's a sinkhole. I wanted evidence that the site was worth paying for, and I just don't think it is right now. Probably not ever. It really sucks that incluye wasted so much time pro bono for you guys ... maybe he can put NARC on his resume some day. But if the same people who were submitting a few thousand maps a month to NUMA before it went down aren't going to submit even a tenth of that to NARC, take it down. No point paying for nothing.

Judging by the conversations I've had with some people, a lot of former NUMA users--considering how many people who used NUMA weren't active on the forums or elsewhere in the community, it would be the vast majority of them--had little idea that NARC exists. I mean, the only mention of NARC on NUMA--which can only be seen when it's online, obviously--is "NUMA down? Try NARC for all your N map archiving needs! http://narc.xen.prgmr.com". Yeah, in theory it says enough, but one sentence? Seriously? I'm sure a slightly more eye-catching notice could be made. Ideally--and I don't know what Arachnid's awareness or opinion of NARC is, but at this point, he's lost any right to give a fuck--the NUMA domain should redirect to a page informing people about what's up with NUMA and telling them about NARC. And NARC needs to have something other than a blank front page and an effectively-blank "about" page. And the search doesn't really seem to work. And there's nothing like active authors or hot maps or featured maps. And it doesn't have everyone's old maps. And the domain is arcane.

It's, you know, not ideal. I appreciate the fact that building a website like this isn't easy--let me be clear, I appreciate the fuck out of this--and that NARC is better than nothing--much, much better than nothing, and again let me be clear, everyone should be already using NARC as it is. It's a perfectly good place to put maps. But it's unreasonable to blame the community when NARC appears to be pre-beta and nothing like an authoritative, proper place to store your valuable maps. As far as they're concerned--and this ties in with the awareness issue, since they don't know exactly what NUMA's problems are or why NARC is a better, long-term solution--NARC is worse than NUMA, so why would they use it? Just a little bit of polishing would go a long way to make the website seem 'inviting', so to speak. That, combined with the more pressing issue of informing the users about it are the two problems we're facing.

An official (slash de-facto) change-over needs to be made from NUMA to NARC. Clearly, that hasn't happened, but more importantly, only token efforts have yet been made to make it happen. It's not like we've done everything we can and gotten nothing out of it. Surprisingly little has been done to change the situation. And I don't think it's too late. We're certainly at a massive disadvantage, since NUMA has been fucked for months now. But it's not over. Momentum can be built up behind NARC. And I'm not ready to let the community die yet--and that's what giving up on NARC would mean.

!!!!!!!!!!! wrote:I submitted my best map ever here and it disappeared, so I've kinda been holding a grudge against it.

You're such a
Huh!? you expected shadowing!?!?!?

Probably people would rather wait for the "official" one than a less "official" one. Anyways, submitted my first map on it.

One other thing, i know nothing of scripts or anything like that but, could NReality load maps from NARC, that would bring the entire highscoring community to it, once again i know nothing, but, i expect NReality has 'http://www.nmaps.net' somewhere in it's scripting & since NARC runs on almost the same process 'http://narc.xen.prgmr.com/maps' with just '/maps' added to it, maybe NReality could open NARC maps too

Once again i know nothing, all it would need is an extra box for NARC in the userlevels menu, that loads from NARC 'http://narc.xen.prgmr.com/maps/MAP_NUMBER_HERE', aswel as the NUMA box, if this even happened i would really like it to be for 6d4 & 6g, every time i open 6g my .sol gets eaten, but this would be something for UnReality to do, not a big thing but still, you would need him

Also, to anyone involved with NARC other than scythe, the background color of NARC, fucking white? that's the brightest color there is, it's probably 50% the reason i stopped using NARC

Judging by the conversations I've had with some people, a lot of former NUMA users--considering how many people who used NUMA weren't active on the forums or elsewhere in the community, it would be the vast majority of them--had little idea that NARC exists. I mean, the only mention of NARC on NUMA--which can only be seen when it's online, obviously--is "NUMA down? Try NARC for all your N map archiving needs! http://narc.xen.prgmr.com". Yeah, in theory it says enough, but one sentence? Seriously? I'm sure a slightly more eye-catching notice could be made. Ideally--and I don't know what Arachnid's awareness or opinion of NARC is, but at this point, he's lost any right to give a fuck--the NUMA domain should redirect to a page informing people about what's up with NUMA and telling them about NARC. And NARC needs to have something other than a blank front page and an effectively-blank "about" page. And the search doesn't really seem to work. And there's nothing like active authors or hot maps or featured maps. And it doesn't have everyone's old maps. And the domain is arcane.

It's, you know, not ideal. I appreciate the fact that building a website like this isn't easy--let me be clear, I appreciate the fuck out of this--and that NARC is better than nothing--much, much better than nothing, and again let me be clear, everyone should be already using NARC as it is. It's a perfectly good place to put maps. But it's unreasonable to blame the community when NARC appears to be pre-beta and nothing like an authoritative, proper place to store your valuable maps. As far as they're concerned--and this ties in with the awareness issue, since they don't know exactly what NUMA's problems are or why NARC is a better, long-term solution--NARC is worse than NUMA, so why would they use it? Just a little bit of polishing would go a long way to make the website seem 'inviting', so to speak. That, combined with the more pressing issue of informing the users about it are the two problems we're facing.

An official (slash de-facto) change-over needs to be made from NUMA to NARC. Clearly, that hasn't happened, but more importantly, only token efforts have yet been made to make it happen. It's not like we've done everything we can and gotten nothing out of it. Surprisingly little has been done to change the situation. And I don't think it's too late. We're certainly at a massive disadvantage, since NUMA has been fucked for months now. But it's not over. Momentum can be built up behind NARC. And I'm not ready to let the community die yet--and that's what giving up on NARC would mean.

I know about the small announcement -- I wrote it. The last time I personally was able to get on NUMA. That was a long time ago, and I still figured the downtime was relatively temporary. So I didn't put a ton of effort into something eye-catching. Thinking about it, I'm not really sure what I would have written ... the site really just needs to redirect like you suggested. But it's hard enough to get Arachnid to pay attention to NUMA.

NARC still needs polishing, yes. I'll ask incluye about that. School just started back up again for most of us, though, so who knows what's on his plate. I would welcome his input in this thread.

I signed up a while back, but the verification email that gets sent, I don't remember which email it went to, and I've checked all of them so maybe it went to the trash of one and got deleted, but yeah. I can't submit maps atm. Any ideas how to fix it?

ska wrote:Huh!? you expected shadowing!?!?!?

Yes.

Is there someone I can donate to to get numa running all day?

fingersonthefrets wrote:I signed up a while back, but the verification email that gets sent, I don't remember which email it went to, and I've checked all of them so maybe it went to the trash of one and got deleted, but yeah. I can't submit maps atm. Any ideas how to fix it?

I have exactly the same problem, and would love a fix.

You'd think that with a link on the home page of NUMA, people would use it.

Problem is, when NUMA is down, you can't see the link. Romaniac and fotf, could just create another account?

Good news, everyone! The bill has been paid. ortsz donated 400 yen, or $5.06 US, and remaniac donated $40 NZ, or $38.14 US. Somehow, this came out exactly to the bill of $43.20.

In accordance with the nobody pays the whole bill rule, though, I defer $15 of remaniac's money to the next bill (in July) and toss in $15 of my own.

I am glad it is here to stay for the time being. I think the major downfall in use is because it does not work with NReality for highscores and direct loading. We took a step back with NUMA going down. Maybe you should talk to Unreality and see if he has time to program in at least direct loading from NARC if not highscores as well. I think this would dramatically increase the popularity and willingness to make the transition.

scythe wrote:Good news, everyone! The bill has been paid. ortsz donated 400 yen, or $5.06 US, and remaniac donated $40 NZ, or $38.14 US. Somehow, this came out exactly to the bill of $43.20.

In accordance with the nobody pays the whole bill rule, though, I defer $15 of remaniac's money to the next bill (in July) and toss in $15 of my own.

What a show-off, that remaniac.

TheRealOne wrote:I am glad it is here to stay for the time being. I think the major downfall in use is because it does not work with NReality for highscores and direct loading. We took a step back with NUMA going down. Maybe you should talk to Unreality and see if he has time to program in at least direct loading from NARC if not highscores as well. I think this would dramatically increase the popularity and willingness to make the transition.

Completely agree.

I strongly believe that there should be some sort of organised, co-ordinated and “official” cutover. After the cutover all NUMA maps would be migrated, NReality would point to the new site and NUMA would automatically re-direct to it.

I think the steps should be:-

1. Ask UnReality if NReality can be pointed to the new site. (Inc associated links at http://n.infunity.com).
2. A date should be agreed when the transition will take place. (Between UnReality, Arachnid and Scythe).
3. Both sites are taken down.
4. NUMA maps are migrated in full to the new site (maintaining existing map IDs would allow for current NReality submissions to remain valid).
5. Existing NARC maps are assigned new map ID's greater than the last NUMA submitted map.
6. A new version of NReality is released that points to NARC.
7. NUMA automatically re-directs to NARC.
8. Everyone makes the transition.

NUMA is on its death bed and (sadly) it is not going to recover, it's time to push the move, preserve the archive and the related NReality submissions.

I don't know what I can do to help - but I gladly offer any assistance.

_Pai_Mei_ wrote:

TheRealOne wrote:I am glad it is here to stay for the time being. I think the major downfall in use is because it does not work with NReality for highscores and direct loading. We took a step back with NUMA going down. Maybe you should talk to Unreality and see if he has time to program in at least direct loading from NARC if not highscores as well. I think this would dramatically increase the popularity and willingness to make the transition.

Completely agree.

I strongly believe that there should be some sort of organised, co-ordinated and “official” cutover. After the cutover all NUMA maps would be migrated, NReality would point to the new site and NUMA would automatically re-direct to it.

I think the steps should be:-

1. Ask UnReality if NReality can be pointed to the new site. (Inc associated links at http://n.infunity.com).
2. A date should be agreed when the transition will take place. (Between UnReality, Arachnid and Scythe).
3. Both sites are taken down.
4. NUMA maps are migrated in full to the new site (maintaining existing map IDs would allow for current NReality submissions to remain valid).
5. Existing NARC maps are assigned new map ID's greater than the last NUMA submitted map.
6. A new version of NReality is released that points to NARC.
7. NUMA automatically re-directs to NARC.
8. Everyone makes the transition.

NUMA is on its death bed and (sadly) it is not going to recover, it's time to push the move, preserve the archive and the related NReality submissions.

I don't know what I can do to help - but I gladly offer any assistance.

Yes it would be good to have NReality integrated with NARC, but NARC is still quite terrible, until it can get to somewhere around an equal to NUMA, it's not worth the effort

I think arachnid will eventually get NUMA up, if it's not up in 3 months & if NARC has improved, then i guess we would need a change, or you can change now

Improvements to NARC
1 - All links work
2 - Search bar works
3 - Editable avatars/profiles
4 - More/Any sub-menus (even something about the site statistics)
5 - Seperate tags (they are currently seperated by a comma, NUMA is better) & demo data submissions are more clarified
6 - CHANGE THE BACKGROUND COLOR
7 - Fix how the highest number map is at the top of the maps page
8 - Stop calling it NUMA
9 - Something like how NUMA had reviewers & featured maps

Also, UnReality is basically as busy as arachnid

arguments in favor of narc: it's all we've got
arguments not in favor of narc:
arguments in favor of not narc: developers are not paid for it

Paradox-Dragon wrote:Yes it would be good to have NReality integrated with NARC, but NARC is still quite terrible, until it can get to somewhere around an equal to NUMA, it's not worth the effort

I think arachnid will eventually get NUMA up, if it's not up in 3 months & if NARC has improved, then i guess we would need a change, or you can change now

Improvements to NARC
1 - All links work
2 - Search bar works
3 - Editable avatars/profiles
4 - More/Any sub-menus (even something about the site statistics)
5 - Seperate tags (they are currently seperated by a comma, NUMA is better) & demo data submissions are more clarified
6 - CHANGE THE BACKGROUND COLOR
7 - Fix how the highest number map is at the top of the maps page
8 - Stop calling it NUMA
9 - Something like how NUMA had reviewers & featured maps

Also, UnReality is basically as busy as arachnid

Another three months? We have a working map archive in NARC now. Waiting for NUMA to come back at this point is idiocy. There have been absolutely no signs that Arachnid is going to do anything in the near future about the situation. The solution to any problems hence is to improve NARC—let's fix the relationship we've got, not have an affair with a corpse.

noisℯtte wrote:Another three months? We have a working map archive in NARC now. Waiting for NUMA to come back at this point is idiocy. There have been absolutely no signs that Arachnid is going to do anything in the near future about the situation. The solution to any problems hence is to improve NARC—let's fix the relationship we've got, not have an affair with a corpse.

Lets just do both

Okay, then. I like it being named NUMA, and I don't see what the problem is. Also, no more reviews/features, please. That got stale and broke down like... something that got stale and broke down. An archive idea is wonderful, but I wouldn't mind it being a separate entity. The idea that people can start fresh is appealing to me. Baraba is making maps like crazy!

I agree with Orion.
Also, the blank About page cannot be helping with people converting. To someone inexperienced or not clued in on whats happening it could be pretty confusing.