|
[img width=700 height=527]http://i.imgur.com/DJPSjbB.gif[/img]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled social distancing to bring you the July 2020 edition of RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we announce our August Community Playthrough games, reveal our shoot 'em up club title, discuss some open staff opportunities, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3 and please keep you and your loved ones SAFE!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: July 2020 Edition
[img width=700 height=527]http://i.imgur.com/DJPSjbB.gif[/img]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you the October 2019 edition of the RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we will announce our November 2019 community playthrough title, unveil the next game for our site shoot 'em up club, announce the winner of our annual Pain Yourself With Submissions Contest, inform you of a few additions to our database, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. However, our first order of business this month will be to address a tragedy that has befallen on our our members, continue reading to see how you can help out. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: October 2019 Edition
[img width=700 height=527]http://i.imgur.com/DJPSjbB.gif[/img]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you the September 2019 edition of the RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we will announce our spooktacular October 2019 community playthrough title, unveil the next game for our site shoot 'em up club, promote our annual Pain Yourself With Submissions Contest (yes PRIZES!), notify members regarding a small change to our datebase, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals last month. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Continue reading All Our News Are Belong To You: September 2019 Edition
[img width=425 height=315]http://i1029.photobucket.com/albums/y359/necrom99/RFGen%20Blog/the-golden-girls_zps2usj9i5y.jpg[/img]
The staff at RF Generation would like to once again thank all of you who submitted scans and information to our database for the month of April. Please remember to help celebrate RF Generation's 11th birthday by competing in our Pain Yourself With Submissions contest as it continues through the month of May. If you haven't joined the contest yet, don't worry, it just got underway and there is plenty of time left to earn points for submissions and by contributing in other areas of the site. A complete list of rules for the contest are located here. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let's take a moment to thank our top contributors for April.
In April, we had a total of 2,035 submissions and of those, 1,870 were game submissions, and 165 were hardware submissions. Of these submissions, 1,105 of them were images.
Our top submitters (those with a minimum of 100) for April were:
Shadow Kisuragi 352
singlebanana 338
kaysow 189
josulli3 183
Sauza12 175
Flee 119
Techie413 90 (hey, close enough!)
Top approvers for the month included:
Shadow Kisuragi 1,120
Flee 297
Thanks to everyone who made a submission or helped with our approvals for the month of April. Your submissions are what keep this site going and up-to-date. Good luck to everyone in this Pain Yourself With Submissions contest!
[img width=550 height=388]http://media.irishcentral.com/images/MI+Leprechaun+getty.jpg[/img]
Well, March is over and we at RF Generation hope that you found your pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow last month. RF Generation did in fact strike gold during the month with some fabulous submissions and approvals. Let's take a look and see who our top contributors for March were.
In March, we had a total of 2,084 submissions and of those, 1,834 were game submissions, and 250 were hardware submissions. Of these submissions, 961 of them were images.
Our top submitters (those with a minimum of 100) for March were:
kaysow 377
Project Nintendo 290
Techie413 285
Shadow Kisuragi 243
Flee 173
raffa1985 102
Top approvers for the month included:
Shadow Kisuragi 985
Flee 306
Tynstar 124
ApolloBoy 72
Thanks to everyone who made a submission or helped with our approvals last month. When you have a moment, go through your collection and look for any games without a game, manual, or box (front & back) scan. If you have a scanner, scan these things in and submit them to us. Once approved, you will see YOUR scan(s) in the database and in your collection. Plus, you'll have the great feeling of being a small part of this site! How cool is that?
[img align=right width=500]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/48011LuckySeven45000-1.jpg[/img]
Quick! Look over on the right side of your screen, we have exactly 45,000 screenshots in the Database! For those of you reading this in the future when we have more than 45000 screenshots, sorry, but you missed one of the great milestones of your life, better luck next time.
Seriously though, 45,000 screenshots is a lot of screenshots, and they were all submitted by members just like you. So thanks to all of you who have submitted one or more of those 45000 screenshots, without you, we wouldn't be here.
And a special thanks to member Aeroc, for not only submitting lucky number 45,000 but for also submitting what seems like another 20,000 or so screenshots over the years. Really though, this guy has over 11,000 images credited to him in our DB.
So now that we have 45000 screenshots, its only 5000 until we get to the really incredible 50,000 mark, why not help us reach that a little sooner and start submitting some screenshots? We're not super picky, you can use an emulator (just don't ask us where to find one or the ROMs, we can't tell you that), or use a video capture device on the real hardware, you can even set up a camera and take a photo of your TV screen, as long as its a good quality, we'll be glad to add it to the DB.
I ran out of baked goods, so here's Bob Barker instead.
And don't forget about the quest to finish all these milestones by the end of the year. We're half way there, and we have 11 days to finish the other three.
70,000 games45,000 screenshots- 90,000 scans - 1410 to go
- 3000 Collectors on our site (the number of people who have something listed in their collection) - 108 to go
- 5000 hardware entries - 44 to go
5000 members (number of people actively registered on the site/forum)
[img align=right]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/9072870000.jpg[/img]
For those of you who don't keep a constant eye on our DB's statistics, we now have over 70,000 games in our little database. I guess it ain't so little any more. Now, if you're like me, you probably want to know what the 70,000th game added to the DB was. Well, I can't tell you. Not because I don't want you to know, but because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the DB stats and let us go 150 games passed 70,000. I'll blame it on you guys though, you're the ones who added 150+ games in the last day, before the stats on the front page could update. So you all better know that I've got my eye on you and your sneaky submitting ways, we're only 78 hardware items away from 5,000 and I'm going to watch it like a hawk, so don't even try and sneak 79 passed me.
Anywho, congratulations to RFGeneration on having 70,000 games. And thank you to every one who has helped to add those 70,000 games.
We're also really close on a few other milestones, let's see how many we can reach by the end of the year!
- 45,000 screenshots - 151 to go
- 90,000 scans - 2308 to go
- 3000 Collectors on our site (the number of people who have something listed in their collection) - 146 to go
- 5000 members (number of people actively registered on the site/forum) - 49 to go
The site is going down again.
Now, breathe.
This is planned downtime and it's for the better. Our host recently merged with another company and, along with this, they are changing our server configuration. We were on a VPS with 1GB of RAM and a meager 20GB of drive space. We are moving to a dedicated server with 4GB of RAM and dual 500GB drives! More everything! This should allow us to remain stable and hopefully lessen the database connection issues we have been experiencing.
This all goes down Saturday night at 10PM Central US time (3AM GMT). We will be placing the entire site in a maintenance mode. We did it Saturday night in case there were problems so we could have Sunday to fix it, again, if needed.
If you need your fix right away, please go ahead and bookmark this page to get to the IRC room.
See you when we're back!
MySQL did not play nice tonight. We learned a valuable lesson about our server and trying to optimize mySQL tables. Long story short, don't do it unless you shut down the site.
So, the forum got screwed up... again. If you are affected by the forum screw up, I must extend my apologies. But, the forum is back up, using a backup from yesterday to restore order to the messages and topics.
It actually seems like everything that is an Innodb table got restored back to the original configuration. It would make sense that Innodb tables got screwed up as it was Innodb that crashed. Sadly, that means not just the forum reverted, but as some members have already pointed out, the collections have reverted back too.
We are very much trying to keep the site from doing this. We are doing daily backups to ensure all keeps going well. It pains us when this occurs. We all put so much time and effort into this site to make it our community. We will get this site back in tip top shape. The hackers may have taken us down, but we are not out. We will get through this.
Well, here we are, back up again. After over a week of downtime, we feel that we are ready to give this another shot as well as explain what had happened.
Last month, we were informed that our server was hosting a PayPal scam site. Our host was working with us to close up the exploit. It seems that whoever got in may have used more than an exploit. I found a couple of new domains on the server that were not set up by us. After further investigation, it was thought that they had the root password to the server. This fear was confirmed when the site went down.
Our initial check led us to the fact that our database tables had been dropped. That's bad.
[img width=423 height=315]http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lklne4CZne1qh7oxso1_500.png[/img]
This effectively removed our forum and game databases. We have been working to try to restore the forum from the information that was left on the server, but after all of the effort, we were stuck. Eddie was able to get the game database back from early December. This also included the blogs. The forum, however, was not so lucky.
The initial forum restoration that we found was from 2009. This included the member table. I happened to attempt to make a backup back in January, but it only partially backed up. Fortunately, this was successful in including the member list and even PMs. So, while we have now lost a ton of the forum, that can be recreated. The important part is that we were able to recover a fairly recent backup of the game DB and almost all of our members (not sure how many registered in the few weeks since my backup).
Now what happens? This experience has certainly left an impression on me as well as Dave, Eddie, and Mike. We will be implementing means to do (starting off) biweekly backups and as we get things honed in, we hope to get this down to possibly daily. We will also be working to have a system in place to test these backups and make sure they are good to prevent this sort of downtime in the future as well as making it easier for us to move hosts in the future should we need to do so.
We are very sorry that this has happened and that it was down for so long. We hope that it hasn't tarnished our image for you and that you continue to come back. Personally, I appreciate everyone that came in to the IRC room during the down time to keep the conversation going and your words of encouragement really meant a lot. The community has always been fantastic here and now that we're back up, I hope we continue to get stronger as a result. Thank you for your patience with me and my stubbornness to try everything I could to try to get it back to where it was before the disaster struck.
Welcome back to Channel 3!
You may have noticed that swell little section over on the right side of the front page, the one titled Site Statistics, well look at what it says for Total Scans. That's right, over 70,000! That's way more than nine thousand.
Of course, that wouldn't be possible without the thousands of members who have helped by submitting scans of their games. If you've added one of those scans, pat yourself on the back and then thank anyone else who has added a scan. And if you haven't added a scan yet, what are you waiting for? Its very easy to do and your name will be forever immortalized on that game's page here at RF Generation. Everyone who looks at that game page will be looking at your item. If you don't have a scanner, no problem, we also accept photos of items as long as they're high quality.
It looks like the 70,000th scan was for Crusader: No Remorse submitted by y2richie. Congrats y2richie for making history here at RF Generation!
Thanks again to everyone who has made a scan submission.
I wanted to make this blog when the work had been completed but it is taking much longer than expected. As some of you have noticed the PlayStation database has changed somewhat significantly.
A very special thanks is owed to Jason Dvorak (aka dangerboy) over at Game-Rave.com for allowing RFGeneration the use of his information. To help in keeping our(aka your) collection tool the most comprehensive AND accurate on the internet.(If not the most we are quickly closing the gap anyways  )
The bulk of the changes came in the form of variations. Though there have also been quite a few new titles added also.
When this project started we had roughly 1750 titles in the PS database. As of this blog we are just over 1900 entries and should easily eclipse 2000 and possibly even 2100.
In the same vein as the NES and 2600 updates everyone might want to check to make sure that their online collection matches their real world games. There are still some more changes to come. I will post further updates here so that everyone can easily check specific titles.
December has generally been one of the slowest months of the year for submissions, but that certainly was not the case for December 2009. There was an astounding 3,723 submissions in December, 1,254 of those were image submissions, there were 802 image and hardware additions, and 1,346 page edits.
The top ten submitters of the month were also those that had 100 or more submissions, and were: Paully3433, ga5ket, Link41, ApolloBoy, logical123, Madir, bickman2k, Spoon, NES_Rules, and Malingo. Those ten members submitted an amazing 84% of the total submissions, a huge 'thank you' goes out to all of them. But I'd also like to thank those of you that submitted the other 16%, because every submission, no matter how small, helps make our database better.
The top five staff reviewers of all those submissions were: NES_Rules, ApolloBoy, Madir, ga5ket, and bum_man. Without these guys approving your submissions, they would just sit in queue forever, so we should all be very thankful for them.
Now that 2009 is over, its time to thank everyone that has helped RF Generation throughout the year. The top ten submitters of 2009 were: ga5ket, y2richie, ApolloBoy, Funk_Buddy, Madir, NES_Rules, Izret101, Pop Culture Portal, audiman83, and Paully3433. Of those ten, eight had over a thousand submissions, a truly impressive feat. These ten members submitted a total of 68% of all submissions made in 2009. These people are clearly dedicated to keeping RF Generation as THE Classic and Modern Video Game Database.
The top five staff reviewers for 2009 were NES_Rules, ga5ket, ApolloBoy, Tan, and Madir. together they approved almost 15,000 submissions throughout the year. My hat goes off to all you for that feat as well.
For 2009, we had 211 different member submit at least one thing over the course of the year. Together, those members submitted a total 34,883 submissions, of those 17,056 were image submissions, 9,812 were page edits and 5,025 were game/hardware title additions.
With those combined with previous years, puts our database at around 48,000 game titles, 3,500 hardware titles, 52,000 scans, and 28,000 screenshots.
Truly, 2009 was an outstanding year for submissions, but 2010 can be an even better year, and I have a feeling that it will be. But it won't without the help of everyone, so contribute anything you can this year, scans your games and then your friends' games, fill in missing information, whatever you can to help the database grow.
2009 was another great year for RF Generation, we saw many new members discover our little slice of the internet, thousands of additions to our database and hundreds of new blog posts containing everything from members' collection updates to dozens of game reviews to systems reviews to historical background and information. But enough of last year, out with the old and in with the new. 2010 is sure to be another great year for RF Generation, and that great year is starting out with some new staff members.
Those new staff members are Logical123 and Paully3433, and they are the newest DB Contributors. Along with these two individuals joining the staff, there was was also the promotion of Izret101 from DB Contributor to DB Reviewer.
Also coming up this year will be a slight change to the PlayStation section of the database. That change will be the addition of all known variations that we don't currently have. These will include the different types of "long box" variants and rereleases. Check back often for updates on the progress being made there.
Here are some goals for the database that I would like us to meet this year, some will be easy, others are going to be more challenging:
- 50,000 total games
- 4,000 total hardware entries
- 60,000 scans
- 30,000 screenshots
These are not the only things in store for RF Generation in 2010, so be sure to keep it tuned right here to Channel 4 for all the latest and greatest.
This week, we take a look back at the site's fourth year of operation. In 2007, RFGen underwent some major changes including a facelift to the website's look and database structure. It was also a big year for staff hirings as well as milestones which seemed to fly by faster than we could keep track of them!
Also here for your reading pleasure following the Wikipedia entries, are a selection of the most significant events / milestones for the remainder of 2007. Thanks to the bloggers whose hard work, continues the tradition of chronicling site history, which now takes place on the front page of our site. Enjoy!
[img width=468 height=60]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/banners/RFGFullbanner06.gif[/img]
Continue reading RF Generation Timeline Part 4: 2007
|
