getMaNGOS - Review of 2013

[antz]

This post is a look back at 2013 from my point of view, so any inaccuracies are my fault !!

In a nutshell 2013 was a year started in pain and chaos, but also hope too.

January

We were still smarting from the acts of betrayal by some of our long term senior devs during October/November 2013 and the subsequent flame war that ensued.

I was also still settling into my forum admin role, having been promoted in November 2012 amidst the chaos..

On top of that we also discovered that we did not have the funds available to host getmangos for the coming year and had less than a month to pay for the years hosting.

February

Things were starting to come together and discussions were started with several groups to see whether they were interested to joining the mangos team.

March

We launched our test servers for mangos zero called 'Project-Zero' which became a showpiece of what mangos could be

April

We were hit by a DDOS attack which cost us several thousand euros in fines took down the mangos website and forum for a while, but we recovered and got back up and running.

The current admin at that time had their email / github and project-zero passwords hacked and the ownership of the github repos were changed (stupidly to the hackers ownership) and defaced.

The same person damaged the forum databases and destroyed the server running the project-zero server and was then found claiming responsibility for it on another groups IRC channel.

This was the final straw for the founder and also the current admin of getmangos, both decided there and then to call it a day.

At this time I contacted the founder and asked for permission to take over the leadership of mangos and attempt to rebuild eveything, thankfully he agreed.

After repairing the forum and websites and with the help of madmax, we managed to wrestle control of our repo's back from the hacker. Sadly the MangosTwo repo was destroyed by the hacker, we were able to restore it from a backup from prior to the attack. We were then able to annouce to everyone that we were back.

May

We were then hit by a huge DDOS attack and the hosting company decided to pull the plug on the website permanently. The founder who upto now was happy to host the website and forum decided they it couldn't go on as he received another huge bill. A legal dispute followed for us to actually get any sort of control of the domain back.

MadMax and I worked on finding some hosting solutions which would not penalise us for huge ddos attacks, but also to keep the costs as low as possible. In the meantime we were able to contact as many people as possible to let them know that we were still running at a temporary forum address.

The Temporary address was also then DDOS'd and was promptly shutdown.

I purchased the getmangos.eu domain and used that for a basis for the new website, we set up a brand new forum and website from scratch and worked hard to get everything in place as quick as possible.

The infrastructure was picked / designed to be as resilient to DDOS attacks as possible. We also set up a forum mirror which pointed to a server in another country.

We finally got some control over getmangos.eu again and it was pointed towards the getmangos.eu servers.

- We nerviously annouced that we were back again and braced ourselves, thankfully things held together despite further DDOS attacks.

June

We were being contacted by old Devs asking to rejoin mangos and a majority did, things were starting to look up.

- The forum was becoming a hive of activity again.

- I converted the old Archive Forum (containing over 50k articles) plus the old mangos forum into the new forum format and slowly added the articles to it. We also gave those who chose to join the other groups access to this information.

July

This month was the start of two months of hell for me Work wise and Personally.

- A serious design flaw between the asp and database teams meant that the project could not talk to the database. I spent the entire month of July working 18+ hour days at work, which left very little time to deal with anything else.

August

In was still suffering from extreme fatigue from the previous month and had little time to keep on top of things mangos related.

We also started work on a smaller project of taking the inactive project spurious and working to improve it and also make it use the standard mangos databases.

September

I started to get into the swing of things again with getmangos and was pleased to see the return of the founder theLuda in an advisory and mentoring role.

- Plus we also had a decent test server running again thanks to MadMax.

- As a bonus we also had quite a significant number of people interested in becoming devs and helping out. One of the founders of spurious (WowAdict) contacted me and he agreed to join the mangosVB team and officially merge the two projects.

October

Work started on documenting files / processes etc. where the knowledge had been lost in time.

We also started prototyping a new build system as used by other teams.

November

MangosZero 18.1 was released debuting the new build system, there were a few hiccups and it is a bit of a culture shock to those who were used to the old way of doing it.

MangosFour (MOP) got to the past the login screen to the realm selection screen for the first time.

December

The various mangos cores received some dev work.

MangosFour (MOP) got to the character creation screen for the first time.