Hey guys,

Last night was tough. About an hour before I had planned to go to bed, Shar Dundred messaged me about the site returning a 404 File not Found when visiting it. I was shocked and checked it out myself. Yep, the site was gone. I logged onto the server and confirmed that the site was removed. Speechless I logged onto my home server and confirmed that I had a backup. It was only five hours old. But simply recovering the data would not protect us against what happened. It might as well happen again.
In the database I found plug-in which would give an attacker a backdoor. On disk I found a script that did the same. I removed these and started recovering from backup. I also found that multiple admin accounts had new passwords so those were reset. But I still hadn't found the security hole. Ash showed me a website where you can find exploits. We found one for an addon we use and how to protect against it. The company that develops this add-on is not in business any more but there were instructions on how to patch it.
I'm glad I set up backup on The new server, it's only a few days old. I have updated my backup script to back up files every four hours instead of every 24. We lost five hours worth of pastebin entries, resource images, custom avatars and custom profile pictures. This is almost nothing, whew. The rest of the site is stored in a different location and was not affected.
This is while also part of the reason why I want to move to XenForo. It is maintained and generally more secure than our current setup. I know there are still many things I need to change for it to be in all aspects as good or better than this.
The site was down for maybe 20 minutes but it took a few hours to get all the pastebin entries back.
I have written a script that monitors the the web server for code changes. If any file is changed, added or removed I will get an email immediately. This should help with monitoring if something happens.

Ralle

Trial Import

Gather around everyone. I have made a trial import of all data on The Hive Workshop onto the Beta site. The beta site now contains the latest version of the site and all data until about two days ago. I want you to take a hard look at the site. Try to login using your account. Look at your resources and your posts. Look at the site. Is anything missing or out of place? Is anything broken?

Everything except galleries is imported. There is not enough space to have two of everything for a prolonged period of time, so you just have to imagine how the galleries look. They will of course all be imported when we do the real import. I am confident that they work and that you will be happy with them as the XenForo Media Gallery really is awesome.

Social groups are missing. I have decided to ditch them. However, ALL discussions remain. Right now you can see them located here. This is not debatable so don't waste time talking about it.

I want you to test the site. Upload resources, delete them, break them, sell them. Enter the chat and crash it, kill it, burn it. Find all bugs before we move. It's much better to find all problems prior to moving.

If no bugs are found, I plan to schedule the final import in two weeks' time. If not, we'll see if I manage to fix the bugs before that deadline.

Do you find the new site to be slick but not very impressive? Allow me to explain why. This is the MINIMAL amount of work needed to move the site off vBulletin and onto XenForo. Basically it just has the systems needed to manage the data we already had (resource sections, pastebin, chat, rep). The real work starts now. Now where I don't have to maintain two versions of the site. You can expect many new features to show up and a few old ones that did not make the cut just yet.

Oh and by the way. The import of data (except user galleries) takes at least 16 hours. So the site may be down for at least 24 hours when the process is initiated.

Moved to a new Server
The Hive Workshop is now hosted on a server with Linode. I have been using them for a long time with various customers and at my job too. They are fast and they are awesome.

Some of you have had the following issues today:
- unable to login due to IP block
- unable to stay logged in
- unable to see attachments
- unable to attach files
- unable to enter the chat

These have all been fixed during the day and it has been pretty smooth sailing since.

By the way, We are on a server with enough storage to host this site including a complete import of Hive 1 into Hive 2. I will soon publish a new Beta of the site where all content is imported and ask you to take a look and see if everything looks alright. A few weeks after that we will be moving for good.

Ralle

27 March 2016

Members of the Hive staff Kam and PurgeandFire visited Blizzard on the week of patch 1.27. They went there to discuss the patch and the future of Warcraft 3. We are excited to share some great news and the account of their journey.

The Beginning

A few months ago rumors began sprouting about a potential patch to Warcraft III. Blizzard was supposedly in contact with a number of competitive players in China. With the success of NetEase and Blizzard's official GOLD tournament many of us were optimistic that life would be breathed into Warcraft III. A few of you are aware of dialogue that began late January with Blizzard in regards to patch 1.27a - here is the story.

One of our users, Kam, was extra optimistic and resolved to contact Blizzard directly to give input for the patch. He decided to start by contacting Mike Morhaime. The response was rapid and Mike forwarded the conversation to the new Classic Games department headed by Rob Bridenbecker and Pete Stilwell. It was clear from early conversations that there was a genuine investment in helping Warcraft 3 thrive. Kam asked Ralle for help and was adviced to start a thread in Staff Contact to gather as much information as possible for a document to submit to Blizzard. Kam, PurgeandFire and several other staff members participated in the creation of this document. Kam had several phone conferences with Blizzard discussing its contents.

It was compiled using Ezekiel's patch thread along with various suggestions from the Hive community within the Patch 1.27 rumor thread. We wanted it to be open but "razor sharp" so we tried to condense and refine multiple takes on similar themes throughout the forums. We reached out to multiple users and staff members to get feedback as well as read the public threads. It purposely left out melee balance changes since the competitive players have already discussed that with them.

As for Blizzard's feedback on the list and what they will accomplish we can't say because of the scope and we signed non-disclosure agreements. They were definitely excited and extremely appreciative of the report and they'll do what they can at their own discretion. Some tasks have extended production schedules, some are rather vague, some might not be possible, and quite a few are already in production. You can all rest assured that the focus is "not to break shit"!

The document is attached to this thread.

The Journey

Fast forward to the past few weeks. Blizzard invited Kam to visit their headquarters in Irvine, California. He was asked to invite other key members to come along. He extended the invite to several staff and community members, however only PurgeandFire was able to attend.

Kam said:

We traveled to Irvine, spent a few days exploring southern California on the weekend, and visited them on Monday. It started off with a campus tour through their museum which changes regularly, and then through many of their 12 or so buildings which are laced with fantastic Blizzard art. It was pretty amazing - PurgeandFire tried to take as many photos as were allowed:
Blizzard HQ

After that, we went and visited the Classic Games department. We first met with Pete Stilwell and had a conversation with him about ourselves and about Warcraft III. Unfortunately, Monday was substantially hectic. They were expecting to release the patch within a few hours! We also met with Rob Bridenbecker and several programmers. Then we went to lunch at the World's End Tavern and chatted about the future of Warcraft III as well as the details of how things were implemented/going to be implemented.

We met roughly 11 people total on the team for Classic Games (including Rob and Pete... 12 if you include Felix). After lunch, they decided to let us test out the patch before its release! They set up two computers for us and had us duke it out in a 1v1 NE (PurgeandFire) vs. Kam (Orc).

Afterwards we talked a bit about third party tools and assisted in installing JassNewGenPack on their system. It would be unfortunate if the patch ended up having JNGP no longer working (people would have to go back to 1.26a for development or migrate their maps away until someone fixed Grimoire). We showed them how to set it up and it ended up working without any issues.

We talked with the devs a bit more and then, unfortunately, it was time to leave. They had to get the patch out before a deadline, and Pete saw us out.

All in all, it was a fantastic day and it genuinely left me excited for Warcraft III. It is crazy to think that a game so old still has such an enormous fanbase and a company that cares enough to update it.

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The Takeaway

There is an enormous amount of information we are not able to share with you. I know this is frustrating but we will attempt to communicate Blizzard's intentions in place of specifics. Please do not ask Kam and PurgeandFire for information - all we can currently share is here.

Blizzard has been really supportive of our feedback and this compatibility patch is just the first step. Some people have been a bit disappointed with the most recent patch. They had actually been working on the OS updates for a few months, and I believe they wanted to get those issues out of the way before moving on to bigger things. Sorting through the code sounded a bit like archaeology from the way they described it. Fixing all the old compatibility problems was not trivial, but they found some cool stuff along the way -- some of which may be related to the arbitrary order-per-second limit placed on BNet servers.

Blizzard is reading the Hive and other fan sites, and are interested in a continued feedback loop. Most of the document we created will be addressed in the coming patches. This includes the launch of Bnet 2.0 and a substantial increase in map file size limit, perhaps 150 MB+.

Kam and PurgeandFire met numerous coders working in the Classic Games division in addition to Rob and Pete. All of their team is genuinely excited about the future of Warcraft 3. This patch is not a one time deal.

Destiny awaits, my friends.



UPDATE 19 JUNE 2017

Article: Warcraft III - State of the Union
Remaster hints and rumors, patch summary, Warcraft 3 to possibly follow Starcraft: Remastered model

Today we will be deploying 1.27a for Warcraft III. As with Diablo II, this patch focuses on modern system compatibility. It’s exciting to bring some additional support to another core Blizzard game, and we thank you for your encouragement and patience as we continue working behind the scenes on these types of updates.

Please be aware that while we are working on a balance change and new map pool, that work is still in progress and is not part of this patch. We’ll have further details on that as development progresses.

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Patch 1.27a has been released, you can download it here. Or you can click on the Battle.Net button to update your client automatically.

1.27a Patch Notes

Download Patch 1.27a (Reign of Chaos)
Download Patch 1.27a (The Frozen Throne)

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Patch 1.27
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Specific Changes & Improvements
- Throw away that old PowerPC Mac in the closet, we’ve created a new installer to support Mac 10.10 and 10.11
- Improved compatibility with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10
- Fixed a crash caused by Chain Lightning

Known Issues

- Windows 8.1 and 10 saved games are still stored in a location that requires running as system admin
- Some graphical issues with the cinematics are still occurring
- Changes to gamma settings will not take effect in windowed mode
- Cyrillic characters are still not displaying
- Disabled ambient sound while a MIDI issue is being resolved
- Mac 10.9 and earlier are not supported
- Mac build does not support the editor

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