IMPORTANT NOTICE
Website update:
After the extended downtime of the website late 2021 and early 2022 it was identified that a lot (and I mean a LOT) of the custom built functions and templates which Sirrob01 are not easily modifiable to work with latter version of PHP. This has resulted in the need for us to switch hosts to a company which provided access to previous versions of PHP but there is almost zero certainty that this will be the case for the medium term future. As such we need to take steps to ensure that if a forceful upgrade to latter versions of PHP takes places it will not take the website offline like it did last time.
The easiest solution to this is to decommission the functionalities which are causing the critical errors. Virtually all of these functions are directly related to three specific topics on the website:
The first is campaign points tracking. This built in function would automatically search for battle reports, identify their type, attribute a point value and total those points up in relation to campaigns and skirmishes. While it was originally the core function of the website in the opening years, the points system actually fell out of use very early on into the life of the site, so the loss of this function is of no concern.
The second topic is the army profiles. These pages have a huge amount of automated templates and custom functions built into them to allow the creation of the pages in a templated design with embedded features. This allows the automated categorisation of the pages based on the armies faction (like Legion or race), the assigning of a unique identifier and the population of default information based on the faction type. All of this will have to be removed. The immediate result will be that there will not be an automated army profile page creator making it harder for people to create a page in a uniform look. Secondly the grouping of the pages will become far less reliable as it will be left up to the user to incorporate the category codes and links to ensure that they all link back. All in all it will be a big blow but the army pages are one of the less active categories of pages which are used and maintained.
The last topic to be impacted are the campaign and battle linkage boxes. These are present on all of the campaign, battle and some planet pages. They are complex functions built into a template which searches the website for keywords to gather all of the related Battles under a Campaign or a Planet/System and displays them all so that a user can see what other battles took place. This is one of the more silent 'popular' function of the website because people dont know that they are using it, but it is used nearly all of the time. It is where people take a look at one battle and then see the other battles which took place and so click to go see those and then see others and so on. It is something which makes the wiki a rabbit hole of reading the battle reports as they link to each and users dive deeper into the campaigns history and narrative. The lose of this will be a blow which is why that is the first topic that I will be working on to fix and come up with a work around in the event of losing these functions.
In summary, there is nothing planned in the immediate future which will impact the pages, HOWEVER if you are wanting to ensure you have access to your lore that you have written against certain pages, especially your army profiles, then it is ESSNETIAL that you copy that information offline so you can access it in the event of an outage. If you have any concerns, questions or need help, please don't hesitate to contact me through the AUS30K Facebook page.
