jdrgaming site

Some of you have already noticed that the Gametracker widgets at the top of this web site are showing all the servers as 'UNNAMED', although the server IPs and ports are still showing correctly. But player stats are also not being shown.

Here's an excerpt from a recent post on the Gametracker forum: "Please understand; this is a Gametracker global issue. Management has been notified. The technicians do not require individual server IPs or names to resolve the issue. I will update the thread when there is further information available. Yes, this is why some/many/all servers are showing as '--unnamed--' or similar."

Hopefully the service will be fully functional again within a few days.

The JDRGaming web site was down for a few hours today in order to upgrade the site's underlying CMS software.

Nothing much has changed, and I've tested the site's functionality, so everything should work as before. If you do notice anything broken, please let me know: click About/Contact in the top menu.

Making the old stats software compatible with PHP 7 turns out to be a non-trivial task. So I've shelved that project and switched to BFStats for TPU stats.

BFStats has a slightly smaller feature set than its predecessor, select(bf). But it has all the basics. One big difference is that each of your player names has a separate set of stats. That's either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

The stats will update at 3am every day, just like before, but I may increase the frequency to hourly. I had to remove the gold, silver, and bronze stars from the stats, because they were causing browser issues. And I have no idea how the 'score' column is calculated.

I'll roll the stats over in January as before. If there's interest, I'll post all previous years' stats as well.

You can find the TPU stats at the same address as before: tpu.jdrgaming.com.

You may have noticed that all the JDRGaming game servers, as well as this web site, were offline yesterday (July 3) for a while.

The server hosting the game servers was due for a Linux upgrade, which was completed yesterday by 9am. The individual game servers came back online gradually thorughout the day as I performed various tests and fixed the inevitable issues.

There's just one major issue left to resolve: the TPU stats. Stats for rounds completed on TPU are still being recorded, but the web page that shows the stats is not working. I have to dig into the (rather old) PHP code and retrofit it for the version of PHP now running on the server. That could take a while.

Please let me know if you notice anything unusual with any of the game servers, or with this web site. Click the About/contact item in the menu above.

There's bad news, and good news. The bad news is that the IP address for all JDRGaming servers has changed again. As of 2018May12, the IP address is 184.71.170.154.

If you're having trouble joining TPU, please refer to this post for assistance.

The good news is that we're finally on a business Internet plan, which has several advantages. The IP address is static, which means it's much less likely to change randomly. And the available bandwidth has increased from 25 Mbps download / 2.5 Mbps upload to 75 Mbps download / 15 Mbps upload. The increase in upload bandwidth in particular should mean less lag and connection problems when there are a lot of players.

The Internet caching service Cloudflare allows web sites to remain accessible even when the servers hosting those sites are down. It also provides protection against DDoS and related attacks. Cloudflare's basic web site protection service is free. In September, Cloudflare announced that DDoS protection would be extended to free accounts.

The jdrgaming.com web site, TPU stats, BF1942 server, BF2 server, and numerous other sites and services are all hosted on a single server. Clearly, it would be helpful to users if the jdrgaming.com site remained accessible during server outages, and had some protection against DDoS attacks. As of September 26, jdrgaming.com and tpu.jdrgaming.com are protected by Cloudflare.

If you notice any problems with the site or TPU stats, please let me know (About/Contact in the top menu).

Due to circumstances beyond my control, all of the JDRGaming game servers will be unavailable on August 30.

A planned local power outage is expected to last from 8:30am to 6:30 pm on August 30. The outage will also affect this web site (jdrgaming.com).

I will post updates on the @JDRGamingStatus Twitter account as events unfold tomorrow.

UPDATE: As of 12:50pm PST, power has been restored and the server is back up. All game servers are back online.

You may have noticed that the GameTracker server banners at the top of the home page are only appearing sporadically in the last few days. This is apparently happening because GameTracker is currently the subject of a DDoS attack. Hopefully this will blow over within a few days.

You can temporarily fix the problem by navigating to the GameTracker web site.

As of January 25, 2017, traffic to and from this web site is encrypted by default. That means there is no longer any possibility that someone can see your password in plain text as you enter it.

Discord is an excellent, free, gaming-centric chat client that you can use on the web or run as a client on your computer.

I've been using the Discord Windows client for a few weeks now and I like it so much I'm switching to it for JDRGaming-related chat. Previously I was using IRC, but that was a bit tricky to set up for users. Discord is much simpler.

So there's now a JDRGaming Discord server, with channels for each of the JDRGaming game servers. You can use Discord or install the Discord client at the Discord web site.

Here's an instant invite for the JDRGaming Discord server: https://discord.gg/5KVyRUv. I've added the Discord invite URL to each of the game servers, so you should see it when you join or during gameplay.