These past two months have been completely horrible, first I had the unfortunate dishonor of announcing that we had been getting hacked, and after lots of pain staking nights, I managed to fix that. Shortly after my eyes were slightly opened to the situation going on on the site with Rui, I had the unfortunate dishonor yet again of confronting him and having to let him go. I still care about him and I won’t forget what he has done for the site.

The Rui situation had shaken me up quite a bit, finally allowing me to open my eyes to a much greater problem that has been plaguing the site for many years, I am mostly at fault because this all got past me, even though staff members have been getting reported for a long time, I have constantly given them chance after chance, and after so long I just decided enough was enough, we are extremely close to hive 2.0 and the site deserves better than most of the staff that it had. I could not have done it without a close friend of mine, The Dark Wizard who I would like everyone to welcome to the staff, please give him the respect that he deserves. Below are the staff changes that have been implemented recently.

Promoted:
The Dark Wizard: Community Moderator
Vengeancekael: Chat Moderator

Those who resigned:
Joe-Black-5
Billy The Cat
M0rbid will be resigning when a replacement is found

Demoted for being detrimental to the site’s health and well-being.
Rui - Former Administrator
anarchianbedlam - Former Moderator
DonDustin - Former Moderator
Dr Super Good - Former Moderator
Pyritie - Former Moderator

There will most likely be more resignations over the coming days, I encourage everyone to do what they feel is right, but I also have to do what I feel is right and my decision will not be overturned. This is not the end here though, we are already looking at new possible candidates for staff positions, and I will be considering the amount of staff required to run the site, one of the other main reasons for this happening for so many years, besides people abusing my leniency is that our current system requires too many users to properly function. I will be shifting the site to a smaller staff policy, and please do not contact me or any other site staff member that you want to be promoted or feel that you are best for the job, I will instantly reject you. If you get an invitation from me, we will discuss it more then.

~Keep on Mooseing,
Ralle


PS: If you feel that a staff member has stepped out of line and wronged you please do not continue further engaging with the individual in question and immediately contact me by using admin contact or if you prefer something more private, you may use the contact us at the bottom of the site or send me a PM directly,. Screenshots or other types of evidence will help greatly, do not be afraid if it’s an administrator or moderator, just come straight to me. Help me, help you make this the community we all want it to be.

PSS: This thread will stay open but if it falls down hill like the Rui announcement it will immediately be locked. Let us keep this civil ladies and gentlemen, for a greater more brighter future.

Sigh. . .,

I typically enjoy making announcements to you and keeping you in the loop but today I am the bearer of bad news and there is no easy way to go about this, so please stay with me ‘till the very end.

I write this sad announcement today to shed some light on a situation that has been going on for a couple of days and perhaps longer than that. I wanted you all to hear it directly from me to stop all the rumors and hearsay that have been floating around in regards to our former administrator Rui. I don’t know how I should begin, so I suppose I should begin by stating that:

Rui has always been a great friend of mine and I acknowledge everything he has done for this site and all the good he has done but that is no justification or excuse to do what he has been doing as of late and for health of the site, he had to be let go, regardless of how painful it was to do. Allow me to explain:

As of late Rui has been acting strange, strange as in completely out of line and not taking the site’s well being into consideration any longer. This had been apparent for quite some time, but I constantly wanted to give him a chance and acknowledge him for the work he has done. However, the line was drawn at the random demoting of moderators for no reason, globally ignoring users, and just overall mistreating users and abusing his powers. These actions go against everything The Hive stands for and the friendly environment that we have been striving for years to create.

This is a great loss for the community but we must continue to move forward and work together as a community for a greater Warcraft 3 / Starcraft 2 future.

Speaking of a greater future for the community, I may have more information on a later date about Hive 2.0 which got jumped forward to a few months from years due to a good friend of mine. So keep an eye out for that! I promise you will be in for a treat.

~Keep on Mooseing,
Ralle

PS: If you feel that a staff member has stepped out of line and wronged you please do not continue further engaging with the individual in question and immediately contact me by using admin contact or if you prefer something more private, you may use the contact us at the bottom of the site or send me a PM directly,. Screenshots or other types of evidence will help greatly, do not be afraid if it’s an administrator or moderator, just come straight to me. Help me, help you make this the community we all want it to be.

Hey guys
The "Contact Us" form has been down for a while, so any email sent through that has not been received. I feel so bad about this, but if you are awaiting a response, please try again.

Last Wednesday concluded a chapter in Hive history. A malicious hacker had found that we were running an older version of vBSEO and abused this hole to get access to the server and tried to take it over for a bot net. I worked 8 days to find the hole while keeping the hacker out and succeeded. It was a very stressful week. It was nothing personal though, he had a bot, that looked for that specific version of the plugin, to take over servers for his botnet.

Finally, I have been working on a fix for the � symbols all over the site and managed to write a script, that detects text containing those symbols (ISO_8859-1) and convert them to the encoding we are using now (UTF-8).
I will need to do some testing before actually applying the fix on the whole site.

Have a good summer.

Ralle

Greetings, people!

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The data was gathered on the 30th of June.

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Thanks to I3lackDeath for gathering all of the above icons.

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This new part will highlight the most active users in each respective resource section and sometimes even forum sections.

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• Active Contests:
  
  • Icon Contest #10: Custom Models/Skins
  • Modeling Contest 24: FEELS
  
  
• Contest Ideas:
  
  • Zephyr Contest #9 ~ Assassination
  • Techtree Contest #7 Discussion

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Why play a game?

So I went to delve in the shelf of old maps that survived to present days. I found "Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth" (BFME), a map that came from Reign of Chaos, imagine that, and survived until now. It was made by Legend-Fire, then in partnership with Aerovox who later parted ways with him (not in the best terms) to do his own "War of the Third Age" (you'll find it in the Hive's Map Section), now being developed by lord_Turin and NWG_Jonas. You may have heard me mention this map over the past years.Now, the ambient that I found is exactly what motivates this article. Despite the newbies you'll often see leaving the game at the beginning, suiciding heroes (who do not revive), or do nothing all game long, the gameplay is actually not very difficult. However — and we could probably say that the critique starts here —, most of these people don't get help from the experts, which you will find in every game (by my statistics, at least). I remember that, when I started playing (with the faction of Gondor, then a much easier faction to play), a guy named SargentMoose gave me all the tips that I needed: build a castle (something you have to do periodically), keep heroes alive, etc. This would be the very first guy I'd add to my friends list.However, the newbies nowadays don't get to learn anything. Instead of tips to help them play better, they get yelled at, flamed, trolled, and even banned, simply for being newbs — and, mind you, the bot that hosts the game is controlled only by a select few people. This could swiftly take us on a tangent relating to my last article from April: by not allowing the renewal of the playerbase, the players are, ironically, a game's very demise.Regardless, the gameplay itself is propitious for frustration. It is possible, for example, to quickly snipe Minas Morgul: while other units serve as meat shields, units with Siege damage target the main building. Minas Morgul's destruction, in particular, dictates that all of the nine Nazgûl heroes die permanently and, in essence, the dark green player ceases to exist. Grey's (Khand/Rhûn) very function is to target mains with wainriders and then retreat by using a Dark Summoning-based spell (which teleports a number of units to the caster's location). Still, heavy hero targeting also make up for more anger and annoyance, as well as, on top of this, presumed elitists screaming at you because you're trying to have fun and not do everything by the book.Which raises the question: why play the game if you're going to leave frustrated every time? Most BFME players should introspectively ponder on this.

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Global News


Blizzard Entertainment has extended its "Rate the Game" contest, where Starcraft II Arcade Beta players have to play&rate&review a custom map and get a chance to get into the full Heart of the Swarm beta.
See full article here.

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The newest patch to be released is 1.0.3, check out the patch notes here.
It contains a lot of bug fixes, inferno&hell drop rate changes and class balancing.
Be sure to also check out the 1.0.3a patch notes, which takes care of a lot of issues.

The page with the full hotfix patch notes can be found here! (Updated 29/06)

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The cinematic everyone's been anticipating will finally be shown live at the gamescom 2012 games convention, which takes place from August 16 to 19!
Blizzard will be revealing WoW: Mists of Pandaria's Cinematic on the first day.

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azlier: as a rule, decent users of jass never actually make maps

Click to expand...

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This new section is rather experimental, but it should be kind of fun! The objective is to answer as many questions as possible and get the most answers right to earn reputation points! Each user will be rewarded 1 rep for each correct answer.
Moderators may not participate in this.
Editing your post with new answers is not allowed and should your post be edited then you will not receive any rep. (SO DON'T WORRY ABOUT TYPOS)

Questions:

• On a scale of 1 to Deolrin, how fabulous is my avatar?
• Who is the user with this avatar?
• What is the only resource section that doesn't show pending resources on its main page without any filters?
• How many news batches have been published by me, excluding this one?
• How easy is the above question?

*Answered

Due to the low number of questions this time, every question will grant you 2 points each!

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• Please welcome the newest addition to the Hive's Staff, I3lackDeath!
  This pretty young woman will be all over the icons section from now on, moderating your resources actively and with a lot of passion!
  ^{(Please do not feed the icon mod)}

Hello everyone!

This post is just to inform everyone that if you had trouble joining the Chat, it was not your browser or anything, it was really the Chat not allowing people in. Ralle fixed that after I bugged him =P

Also, the wait for v3.2.0 of "The Kingdom of Kaliron" is finally over! Vexen has released a new version today, check it out here!

Don't forget to keep an eye out for our other hosted projects!