Hey folks! We have the results from the Christmahanakwanzika Giveaway, and they are as follows:

Winner No. 1 – Elfangor
Winner No. 2 – Laughmaster
Winner No. 3 – FallingUp

To those who didn’t win, we do appreciate your entering anyways, and we still have other prizes we need to give away. So if you have an idea for a contest in which we could give away more stuff, let us know!

For those users who submitted content to the giveaway, here’s what we had submitted:

A poem from FallingUp:

There was a chat network, ext3
That really, really wanted to be
The biggest and best
Better than all the rest
So they gave away stuff for free!

A photo from Elfangor:

The following entry from Zamabe:

Hello fair maiden,
As you may have noticed via the subject of this electronic discussionary means, I wish to inform you of the seriousness of the MACCI BALLS corporation’s threat to our city. You may well know what our global language is, but unfortunately you are incorrect. The day is Semaphore Loaf of the year 1493. You have traveled forward in time to this dat, one which may destroy the world. Ever since the Pringles corporation went out of business, it was revealed to the world that the will of the owner was to take out mortgates on all of the company factories and begin their misguided attempts to use their reanimation formulas to bring rise to a real Jurassic Park. Though they succeeded, they stupidly thought that dinosaurs would be better off in the local zoo. They donated thousands of dinosaurs to zoos and safaris, but not a sigle one to science. To this day that is the end of history as we know it. So, I emplore you time traveler, to help save the Pringles corporation from dooming us to this horrible future by providing proof of purchase whenever possible.

Here is my proof of purchase, for however many contest entries it may be worth.

PS. You hereby have permission to use the contents of this email in whatever way you like given recognition to the author. BAHAHAHAHA.

The following entry from LaughMaster:

Every time I try to think of something funny to say for this I end up just giving up on it. People always assume Laughmaster means I’m funny. It doesn’t, it means I laugh a lot.

The following video/photo from Olli:

The following photo from Duck:

The following photo from Clueless:

And the following ASCII art from __import__:

Hey folks,

You may notice that “Stop Censorship” banners have been posted on the ext3 sites. This is to help raise awareness of what’s going on with the SOPA bill in Congress currently.

This is relevant because SOPA will affect the internet in a generally negative way. As far as ext3 is concerned, this could effect our means to do things like have holiday prize giveaways, among other things.

More information about SOPA can be found at http://americancensorship.org.

Hey ext3!

Today I decided we should do something for Christmahanakwanzika. Sponsored by ext3 and its users, we will be giving away various prizes for the holiday season. Drawing details and prizes are below.

All prizes are provided by ext3 users and staff by donations. Feel free to add to our prize pool (information below).

Entrants (you guys!) can sign up for the drawing by e-mailing giveaway@ext3.net and including your name and ext3 account name (your NickServ name). I would love to see a drawing or a joke attached with every e-mail, but that’s totally optional. (Any drawings sent by you will not be laughed at, I promise. I’m not an artist either. But I’d love to feature them on the website.)

• We will accept entries up to December 17th, 2011 (PST). The random drawing of the names will take place on December 18th, and winners subsequently contacted via e-mail and IRC.
• Winners will be announced on IRC after they have picked their prizes.
• Multiple entries are prohibited. Don’t try. Being a moron and trying to trick me will have your chance of winning removed.
• You cannot win twice, sorry.
• We will pick at least three names for rewards. At our discretion, we may pick more names to win. Any extra prizes will be saved for a future giveaway.
• Staff and their friends and family will be allowed to participate. Don’t worry. They can’t cheat.
• Tell your friends and family! You’ll obviously get to play if they win!

Current prizes

Portal 1 + 2 Bundle

Both of Valve’s amazingly fun physics portal-puzzle games. A must-play for all ages. Features dark humor and insane, evil computers. Rated E (10+) for ALL the people!

Requires a free Steam account to play. http://store.steampowered.com/app/620/

Portal 1

Just Portal 1. Still an amazing game. http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/

Portal 2

Just Portal 2. Also an amazing game.

Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West

Olli is donating three copies of Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West for the giveaway. Thanks Olli!

Lead and Gold is full of explosions, traps, and other old-west cowboy-style gunfighting. Made by Paradox Interactive, this shooter focuses on multiplayer gameplay.

Requires a free Steam account to play. http://store.steampowered.com/app/42120/

 Terraria

Terraria is a 2D sandbox/survival game which is akin to Minecraft. We have three copies available as prizes. Check it out below.

Requires a free Steam account to play. http://store.steampowered.com/app/105600/

 Borderlands

goose and Olli are donating copies of Borderlands! Borderlands is an RPG/first person shooter game in which you are trying to find “The Vault”. Many days of gameplay to kill your Christmas break. Best played with friends, but can easily be played on single player.

Requires a free Steam account to play. http://store.steampowered.com/app/8980/

Magicka

agdurrette has kindly donated a copy of Magicka. Steam can tell you more about it than I can.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/42910/

The Fine Print

The drawing will be preformed by SnoFox using a computer program to randomize the nicknames.

Anyone is free to enter; the only “qualifier” is that you must be an active user on the network. Note that by “active”, we don’t mean you have to be online 24/7/365; but you must be a user who does make the occasional appearance and conversation. Discrepancies on a user’s level of activity will be reviewed by a staff member if any conflicts should arise. What we’re essentially saying is people who register simply to be entered into the drawing and never come on or appear on the network will be disqualified.

When the drawing is actually preformed, it will be preformed on a network admin’s computer. Any concerns of cheating or unfairness should be brought to the attention of the ext3 staff.

If the winners do not claim their prizes within one week (seven days) then their prize will be forfeit and a redraw will be done to determine a new winner for the forfeited prize(s).

These rules are subject to change at any time without notice. Check back here for the most up-to-date revision.

Hey folks,

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on numerous new upgrades and features for the network. This includes:

• http://quotes.ext3.net/
  As of Sunday, November 20th, 2011, ext3 now provides its own quote database, to allow users to submit their shining (or lack thereof) moments to be held in the QDB and be looked back upon. Note that all submissions are subject to moderator approval by the ext3 staff before being published on the site.
• http://wiki.ext3.net/
  We’ve put together a wiki on our network, to assist users with ShadowIRCd, Atheme IRC Services, and other functions of being on IRC.
• http://p.ext3.net/
  The ext3.net pastebin — Here you can paste blocks of text and code with syntax highlighting as needed, to share with other people. As well, we provide private pastebins. You can get your own private pastebin by going to
  
  http://<your-subdomain>.p.ext3.net/
  
  Where <your-subdomain> is whatever you want it to be, i.e. http://goose.p.ext3.net/ or http://opers.p.ext3.net/.
  
  You can also go directly to a syntax highlighting pastebin by using the language as the private subdomain.
  For example:
  http://perl.p.ext3.net for perl
  Or http://python.p.ext3.net for python.
• http://irpg.ext3.net/
  Beginning Monday, November 21, 2011, at 0900 EST, ext3 will be proudly hosting an IdleRPG again. You can find more information about it at the above site. Please know that this IdleRPG is not at all like a typical out of the box IdleRPG, but has been heavily modified to be more entertaining.
• New HUB
  As of October 30th, ext3 has switched HUB providers to a server which in short, was much more powerful than the one the previous HUB was. In doing this, we continue to pursue the goal of never having another major services/HUB outage like we did before. As well, not that the previous HUB was unsecure (It was), but the new HUB has additional security in place to help keep your private data private.

Any questions/comments/ideas/feedback about the new services should be directed to #ext3

goose

Hey folks,

We restarted IRIS today, the downtime was quite literally less than 30 seconds. We restarted it for two reasons:

• The /SLAP function has now been removed from IRIS, per popular request.
• IRIS now supports HTTPS.

This means that, in addition to accessing the plaintext webchat client at http://webchat.ext3.net/, you can now also access the SSL webchat client at https://webchat.ext3.net/.

Apologies if the restart-disconnect was an inconvenience for you; it’s all just part of our master plan to continue to bring you a better IRC experience!

As usual, questions/concerns/comments/etc to #ext3.

goose

Hey Folks, good news! Our network HUB and Services are back online!

We apologize for the downtime everyone experienced (especially with services), and are currently taking steps to insure that a similar situation never happens in the future.

Thanks for sticking with us through the technical difficulties!

As of August 15th, 2011, the Mibbit webchat client is banned from the ext3 network. The reasons for the ban are outlined below.

On August 13th, 2011, an anonymous hacking group had exploited Mibbit’s servers, which granted the hackers root access to Mibbit’s tools server. The hackers then released some of the content they had found: IRC logs, clear text passwords and Mibbit’s Wiki passwords, along with other unimportant files. The logs suggested questionable activity from Mibbit staff and raised the question, “Is Mibbit still logging users without permission?” For the safety of our users, we have indefinitely revoked Mibbit’s access to the network as a whole.

We understand that sometimes, a web IRC client is a necessity, due to lack of a locally installed client. For this reason, we offer an alternative to Mibbit. We run a web IRC client at http://webchat.ext3.net/ which is compiled and run entirely on our own ext3.net servers.

The client is called “Iris“, developed by the Atheme team, and is a fork of qwebirc. It allows for many features which Mibbit does not (the biggest being SASL authentication), and is and always will be completely ad free. There is also a tool which you can use to create a widget for your website or other needs you may have for an integrated web client.

As always, any questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, or otherwise can be directed to any staff member in #ext3.

Hey folks,

In keeping everyone up to date on the issue of the lack of HUB and more importantly lack of services, we’re glad to let you know that our worst case scenario will not come true, and that the services databases are in fact not going to be lost in a black hole forever.

The HUB box had a faulty PSU and subsequently the RAM on the box went out. The hosting provider is working to fix these as soon as possible, and with any luck, we should have everything back to normal by the end of the day.

Again, thanks for bearing with us through this difficult time, we apologize sincerely for the inconvenience, and will be making some changes to ensure a situation like this never arises again.

goose

Hey folks,

As many of you have noticed, we experienced some technical difficulties last night. I’d like to take a moment to explain what happened for everyone to understand.

The IRC servers that you connect to and chat on are what we call our “client servers”, or “leaf servers”. We have a total of four of them. When you connect to “irc.ext3.net”, that address takes turns sending our clients to each of the leaf servers, to evenly distribute the traffic among each of our leaf servers.

The reason the client servers are also referred to as “leaf servers” is because they are (metaphorically) leaves on a tree. That tree is what we call our “HUB”. The HUB is the central server which: 1. All the client servers connect to, and 2. Which runs our IRC services. No clients connect to HUB, it exists purely to centralize the communications between everything that goes on with our network.

Our client servers are each in separate datacenters spread across the world; we do this so that if one datacenter has an issue, we still have three more which we can divert all our traffic to. As well, our HUB resides in a separate datacenter from any of our client servers. Of all the client servers and the HUB server which we have, until this month our HUB was unquestionably the most stable server in our network.

Last night, without warning, the entire datacenter which our HUB resides in went down. As a result of this, each of the client servers lost communications with the hub server, splitting the leaves off the tree and separating all the client servers. Thanks to Josh/SnoFox’s quick reaction, we were able to shift the client servers to a new temporary HUB, bringing all the leaves back together onto a new tree; however, as of right now, our HUB is still down, without explanation.

We have contacted the people responsible for maintaining the HUB, and are awaiting a reply as to why it went down, and based on the reason for its downtime we will decide if we’ll continue to use it as a HUB or not. However, there is a second issue which I’m sure many of you have noticed; the lack of services.

As previously mentioned, services are hosted on the same HUB server, so without the HUB server, there are no services. While we do have a backup copy of services compiled and ready to go, we’ve run into an issue we had never previously envisioned, and therefore had never prepared for.

When you register with services, the email address, your username, your (encrypted and non-human-readable) password are all stored in a “database” file, on the HUB server. Because we highly value your privacy, those databases are very secretly kept, and moved around as little as possible. While we DO have a backup copy of services compiled on our temporary HUB, we do not have a copy of the database file on the temporary HUB. So while we could fire up the temporary services, all of the NickServ, ChanServ, and other registrations would be gone; it would essentially be the same as starting services over from scratch.

In the mean time, we’re continuing to attempt to contact those responsible for the HUB’s downtime. At this time, it has been approximately 15 hours since HUB went down. We’ll keep you posted as we find out new info, and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Unfortunately, these things happen. Please feel free to stop by #ext3 and express any questions or concerns to any of the staff members there.

goose

Welcome to the next ext3.net web page! It’s under construction right now, but at least it’s up and working!