TheLuda

Of course. Both

You've pretty much set the theme with your comments, and I couldn't help to get this feeling. Like... it's all a big plan, to make us dumb with preventing us from gaining knowledge. Somewhere along those lines I looked over my back to see if there was an agent with sunglasses around. Isn't it weird, how close movies and reality can be sometimes? The whole concept of knowledge and learning not being a human right smells just like a large conspiracy theory. Anyway, let's do something against the issue, and make us heard.

The matrix is out there.

Nicely expressed.

Not yet. I am working on figuring this out. The law just states the initial capital for a foundation needs to be sufficient for it to fulfill the purpose of the foundation. A bit spongy I'd say. The local authorities do judge on this. It already does, mostly due to the amazing creativity and abilities shown of. Look at all the great developer patches done the last months. Amazing is the word.

I have been investing money into this since 2005, just because I love the idea, and let alone seeing the progress and knowledge shown by the team is worth it. And I will surely continue to do so. I am already working ~ 15 hours per week to do email support and keep the site running, plus a few other things. It's acceptable, and since my wife is no longer in cancer treatment, I have more time to do all this. That is why I am focusing on the aspect of unhindered learning as human rights. I will invest what is needed into this, because I think it is worth all this and more.

I have been investing money into this since 2005, just because I love the idea, and let alone seeing the progress and knowledge shown by the team is worth it. And I will surely continue to do so. I am already working ~ 15 hours per week to do email support and keep the site running, plus a few other things. It's acceptable, and since my wife is no longer in cancer treatment, I have more time to do all this. That is why I am focusing on the aspect of unhindered learning as human rights. I will invest what is needed into this, because I think it is worth all this and more.

Of course, if this all is insane, and the community thinks it sucks big time, I'll just drop the idea. Just wanted to mention that.

The legal body would actually be a non-profit organization, much like the Apache Software Foundation, or similar solutions. It would be registered in Europe, to make sure we would fall under the European, liberal jurisdiction. The foundation could - do to its legal status - e.g. engage in bigger projects. I am thinking about stuff like European user / developer meeting. Since I have been working in non-profit organizations almost all of my life, I have pretty good connections. It is not too hard to get some sponsoring for this, and IMHO the purpose of unhindered learning is worth the effort. I have seen and experienced myself what value the chance to learn means, to know for sure how important this is. The foundation would have authority over mangos and it would have the rights, and would have the ability to ensure nobody does bad things with our stuff. I have been dealing with this foundation thing for almost two years now, mostly due to the fact that the legal groundwork for a real non-profit foundation was not possible without a damn lot of research, and quite a bit if paid legal advice. Sadly founding a non-profit organization is not as simple as it could be, and I had high hopes for the European Community creating a law that would have allowed for a much easier process. As mentioned above, I am through the counselling with a lawyer, now I translate the documents to English, and will put them on the Wiki very soon, next days. In the end I have to be honest: I am not just doing this for the good cause. Yes, one of my goals behind this is to ensure that this good thing will last for a long time, but the other goal is to create the chance for some meet and greet, make it possible to legally have the same good stuff other open source projects have. Do I hear mangos camp or something like that? Dunno, getting sponsored travelling for the development team to have a yearly pizza and beer camp would work, too

Well, the logo actually is intended to be a clever pun on the company which produces the server we use as inspiration. Clouds, storm, flashy lights Did I try to be too clever with that pun?

It has been a while ever since the mangos foundation has appeared on this site, and in the documentation, and up to now it was (and is) a private foundation. Since this is the time of the year, when things are to change, I invite the mangos community to join the change. What is the purpose of this? The purpose of mangos is gaining knowledge and insight into the process of development, and we do encourage this. Sadly ... where you live determines what you can do legally. If you are a European, and a student, you are lucky. You could even legally reverse engineer the official game client using disassembly tools, and other utilities. If you are from the US and want to avoid the risk of being jailed for violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, you are limited in your options. You then may play the game, observe mechanics, and document them in our Wiki. Anything beyond is a legal risk for you, and we can only advise you to not engage in such activity. The mangos foundation is supposed to help change this. Knowledge, insight, learning, studying, expanding your abilities should be a fundamental human right! What is the connection to the mangos server(s)? Simple enough: it showcases how an individual can grow in his or her abilities if he/she can learn without the risk of being put to jail. Look around in our amazing community that has been growing and expanding for five years now. There is no other server community as old as ours, and no other as mature, friendly, caring, and sharing as this one. I - your wooly, elusive sheep - do strongly believe that all of this is only possible because of the exceptional attitude towards freedom and humanity shown by you, our community members. Have you seen other similar projects, where people are treated as kind as here, where even the lowest troll can grow into something better? I doubt it. So there is your connection: the mangos server project shows how important free, unhindered learning is. Personally I would not want to miss a day of all this. I have learned so many things, and all just because of this project. What can I do? As usual there are quite a few options among everyone can chose. Stay with us, have a good time, and increase your knowledge. This is the easiest thing to do, and everyone can and should do it. If you do not have time for more but want to help, you can help funding the foundation. Click the heart, give a little, or give more, whatever you like. Turning the private foundation into a legal body will require legal consulting (*ouch*). If you like to get work done, we have something for you, too. We are translating the founding documentation to English currently, and I intend to work out the final version on our Wiki in a community process. Should you prefer even more work, there of course is and always will be. What is going to happen next? First, I would love to hear what you think about this. Is the sheep crazy? Am I to idealistic about this? Is this bullshit? If the community does like the idea of having a legal body taking care of the project and its long term existence, I'll publish the translated founding documents, and we can continue with the legal work. Voice your opinion! This is it for today. I am looking forward to your input. Criticism, too. With kind regards, TheLuda (sheep)

Help always is welcome. There is more work than manpower here. Do not copy the official WoW Cataclysm site. This is not legal. You could design and build your own site not abusing property for which paid developers invested work. The purpose of mangos is gaining knowledge and insight into the process of development, and we do encourage this. Consider your country. Where you live determines what you can do legally. If you are a European, and a student, you are lucky. You could even legally reverse engineer the official game client using disassembly tools, and other utilities. If you are from the US and want to avoid the risk of being jailed for violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, you are limited in your options. You then may play the game, observe mechanics, and document them in our Wiki. Anything beyond is a legal risk for you, and we can only advise you to not engage in such activity. Beyond all this, the easiest way to start is looking through the code we have, and compare what our code does to documented game behavior on Wowwiki/Wowpedia/Wowhead/etc. Submit reports if the behavior does not match. If you already gained sufficient insight into our code, you may try to submit patches generated by git. There will surely be a developer willing to review your submission, and give hints on the quality of it. In common the mangos developers will tell you if a patch is acceptable or not, and if not you will receive hints as to why it does not suffice. This is the basic schema of joining this project. Usually it takes a few weeks or even more time of effort before you and we can actually make an educated decision on a permanent, official membership. Ever since this project was founded in 2005, the primary reason for actually being accepted as long-term team member was showing continued effort and ability to grow beyond your initial skill level. I hope this did answer your question, and explains how we handle things.

... well, the topic says it, it is this season, where people somehow have these warm, kind feelings, and the sheep apparently is no exception. I have considered to start a campaign and actually help some people, collect some funds and help a few people get food, or something along those lines. What do you think? Worth the effort or a waste of time?

Source code and tracker is moved for a few days into the announcement box below the navigation. There will be a new global navigation added soon with all the important stuff.

Oh me oh my oh yeah, that is fixed now.

Private messages are back among other tiny fixes. Been pretty much rewriting all of the forum modifications to something nicer. Oh, don't be surprised to see prettier URLs now. Made them readable

Apparently it took a day longer But... we have private messages back, among tons of other stuff fixed. See for yourself and enjoy.

I've learned that the hard way the last month that trust is nothing you should invest as a freelancer. Been trying freelance to stay home and be there for my family, but up to now the results are rather unpleasant. I attract the bad customers like shit attracts the fly.

*sigh* I must do something wrong. Worked three weeks on freelance, and wow... 100% let me finish the work, and refuse to pay. I really seem to attract this sort of shit. Should anyone need some web development or design works... I'ma available for paid jobs.

The sheep added hints for older clients to the home page.

Thank you very much! *puts on the Indiana Jones hat and studies*

Just wondering: does anyone have one IDB for WoW.exe from client 1.12 around? Or probably the offset for the infamous opcode handler? The sheep would like to learn a bit more about the WoW client, and considered starting with the old version may be easiest due to less stuff in there

The big issue with that knowledge is that due to the frequent client changes it does get invalid too fast for people to invest effort for documenting it. The WoW.Dev Wiki does have a few things on opcodes, and packets. If you have done analysis on various client versions, a versioned approach might be good. A nice of example of showing different versions for a schema is to be seen on MediaWiki.org. The have spruced up their database definition and table definitions quite nicely with version information. Of course, you can peruse the mangos wiki, too. I'd even be happier to see stuff added there, since a few file formats already are described there.

The sheep is sad to confess that times are not better this month. Sadly nobody hired the sheep for contract work the last weeks, and thus I am severely lacking funds.

mangos has been here ever since 2005, and as you and others may have noticed: there have been thousands of people telling us we suck, and we will sooner or later fail and be shut down by Blizzard. There have been numerous projects, including Antrix, Ascent, etc. which at one point started to use and enjoy code created by mangos developers, and always sticked to claim those patches had been built themselves. Guess what? Sooner or later those projects discovered the end of the road because they lacked own efforts. And guess what? Every time mangos has offered every of those projects a home, where they could actually learn stuff and do things for real. Now let me see... what do you think are the chances that all those emulator teams will team up? Zero. Just for the same reason the topic creator has worked on a closed source emulator which surely contained code by mangos.