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2009 never started out too well for me, almost everything sucked. Until February rolled along…

On Friday the 6th of February 2009 I was promoted to Support Staff at Zathyus Support.

“What?” I hear some of you ask. For those of you who are un-familiar, Zathyus Support is the official support board for InvisionFree and ZetaBoards, both of which are free message boards that allow you to create an online community; from Guild Clans and RPG’s, to Animals and Sandwich Making.

I somehow have a small dedication to the Zathyus Network, even though our community forums are self hosted. I think it has something to do with the in-ability to break free. They lock the gates tight on a night; and have scary security peoples too.

During some random moment on IRC, I was approached by Stephen who told me the staff team wanted me and asked if I was interested. I was speechless; shocked; and surprised at the opportunity. It’s certainly a great honour to be apart of the community, let alone the staff behind it.

I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year brings, and look forward to many anniversaries as Support Staff.

I’m certainly on something this week.

For the first time ever, I think, I have an image in my Zathyus signature.

I was slightly bored yesterday, or possibly the day before, I hadn’t slept for quite a while; and decided to make an image, which actually turned out pretty good.

The little fluffy kitty on it is something I came across in Google, so if you made it; or know the person, leave a comment so I can praise you. It’s soooo cute.

You can head over to my Zathyus profile and have a look at me.

Since you’re here now, my guess is you stalk me anyway.

Not so long ago the ZetaBoards IRC channel was sort of semi took over.

A message from Kezzie & Tony: “On behalf of your supreme master, Stanley, this channel is now ours!”

As no-one seemed to be around it was decided that we would stage a topic change, on behalf of our beloved leader Stanley.

It may not be the channel takeover of the year, but it’s good enough! If anyone wishes to dispute it, Stanley will feast on your remains.

Over at Zathyus Support, a user requested some support to edit the colour of their portal sidebar links.

Being a nice guy, I linked them to two topics that would give them all the help they would ever need when styling the portal. This is where it became worse.

The user either hadn’t read the topics, or just skimmed over them and then stated that nothing worked. OK, that’s fine, so I post up the method they would need to use, again hoping they would read it. They never read it, stating that what I posted changed the backgrounds according to the image from one of the earlier linked topics. Hmm, so now they have read the topics, but it seems apparent they haven’t tried what I posted.

This is where a nice little rant comes in to play. I growled a bit, then moaned a bit, and guess what. The previous post I made suddenly works!

I implore everyone to rant nicely every once in a while. People may start to learn, and not just take take take.

The Zathyus Anniversary has come to an end after three weeks of celebrations, and it couldn’t have ended better.

First of all, the staff have done an awesome job organising the events and I wish to say thank you once more, so thank you!

Time for some of the best news now! Throughout the games we had the chance to earn points by participating in, and winning, the events. Some of the games, like Zathyus Trivia, gave us the opportunity to gain hundreds of points towards our totals. After three weeks of gaming I have managed to amass myself 869 points, which is a lot!

So much so that the next person only had 540. With a clear 329 point lead I was declared winner of the anniversary events. Woo!

Not only do I win bragging rights, but I have prizes from the staff, which include:

• A user group change; group icon; and coloured name for four weeks;
• Two months of ZetaBoards Premium, for free;
• 25,000 Ad Removal credits, for free;
• and a $25 gift card for threadless.com from my Boss Lady.

I’m slightly surprised I won, as I never thought I would. Especially by the margin that I did.

I want to once again say well done to the other winners, Tim and ElementalAlchemist, and DanT for winning the iPod Touch. Well done guys.

Now I have to decide who to pass the board related prizes on to.

Over at Zathyus Support, as part of the Anniversary, we had the chance to create a few items for the staff in the Extreme Makeover Competition.

Quite a lot of the entries are really good, which you can see for yourself.

I had a go at an emote for Brian, and he has decided to use it. Yay, ph34r my ImageReady skills.

This is the emote I created:

I’m almost happy with it, I just don’t like the cards. There is still excess white in the background, but that was due to the default base .png having it. If I messed about with it everything would have been ruined. I have now since solved the issue of excess white, and edited the icon slightly to optimise the layers and change several frame rates.

Hopefully the emote will stay with Zathyus for a long time. That would be really nice.

Woooaaa, after tallying up the point totals I’ve come to realise I’m now in third place overall. :D

Yay, I’m good at stuff!

I’m somehow also second in the Zathyus Trivia, which is surprising since I barely know anything about what’s happened through the years. (I have had to do a lot of searching to find the answers I’ve gave).

The current question has me stumped though, as well as the random hidden trivia. St00pid trivias!

I’ll just have to try my hardest and remain at the top of the rankings. I wonder if I’ll still get my bonus 5 points for keeping score?

For the past couple of days, and for the next couple of weeks, InvisionFree/ZetaBoards Support are celebrating their 6th and 1st year anniversaries respectively.

There have been several games created to mark the celebrations, and more will be created at a later date, for the community to take part in.

Once again, Guild War is back and once again I’ve set up a guild to participate. There is also the ever popular Deal With The Devil, which I have never took part in before, so should be great fun.

There is also a trivia contest, but I’m never any good at them so most likely won’t find the answers anywhere.

The next couple of weeks will likely be a relaxing, yet stressful time. It’s all fun!

Loading up trusty old Google for a little search time I noticed a few new icons kicking about near the results. “Hmmm”, I mumbled, “Are those something pointless from avg or something?”. Becoming intrigued I decided to click on one that just so happened to be next to my websites listing. Whaaat?

Nothing really happened, just my name appeared underneath and an arrow went green. This made me search for answers to this new feature, and I’m slightly surprised to learn it’s just a giant bookmark system.

You no longer need to bookmark 500 pages in your browser, just keep 20 search terms and let Google store everything for you. … actually, that’s a good idea; we won’t inadvertently loose any bookmarks after a bad browser crash and not backing up the bookmarks file like we’re supposed too!

This whole system has no effect on other peoples searches, it’s just there for you to keep the best, more informative, sites on top. Clicking the up arrow moves the result to the top of the list, and you can remove ‘bad’, less irrelevant, ones.

I like the idea of this, as it ensures the information you want stays within reach; if it doesn’t warrant a bookmarking. Mainly when you think you’ll never need something again and later realise you do and just can’t find it.

Students could find this useful, when they research at home they can promote a result; then login to Google at Uni/College and the sites are there waiting, without the need to write them down; especially useful when creating a bibliography! (Shame this feature wasn’t released when I was writing one).

A nice addition to the Google search.

Now if only I had things to search for . . .

The alpha preview of IP.Board 3.0 has been opened to the public for about 19 hours now, and I must say it looks very nice.

• There has been a mass re-design of the colours and images, which will take an hour or so to get used too;
• The layout has been improved, with emphasis on navigation;
• Speed wise, I’m using my bandwidth with other things so it currently seems similar to 2.3.6;
• The flow of the board is really nice, everything seems to fit together well;

As this version is still only alpha there may be a lot of work to do before a beta is released, although there might be something within the next few weeks. Either way, we shall install a test environment to fiddle with the admin side of things; and work out the new layout a bit more. Keep a look out for updates to this!

You can check out the new software as a guest, or if you’re registered with IPS then simply login.

This new release seems very promising, and is a definite plus to IPS. We look forward to the release.