After the quite chaotic launch yesterday I'd like to write a couple of lines about the current state of the page, its (partly misunderstood) featureset aswell as ask for your contributions and point out a couple of things I'd like to see implemented in the near future.

So about the launch... it took a while and some may say it was rushed at a too early state; i mostly agree with that. It should have been done a couple of days later and prepared more carefully, but I can't blame anyone since I was one of those who pushed for a release.
Why?
Simply because I felt that the page in its current state (feature wise!) is superior to cf3. By releasing now we (and by "we" I mean "you") will have a far better insight in the development of the page. Yes, there will be bugs, there will be glitches and annoying banalities - but yes you can also follow how the page develops and grows and take a much better influence into the process since you can see developments from an early stage and express your opinions on it.
This is what TosspoT has to say about it:
Quote by TosspoTThis actually is why we had to make the move, a question many of you have asked. Crossfire has been a bit of a bodge job for a long time, work with the Crossfire 3 backend lead to the mental breakdowns of many of your favourite Crossfire admins such as Fusen & Plekter. It was built in a way that meant we could literally could not add a single new feature anymore. We could not add an integrated gallery system for LANs, we couldn’t add a bracket system for tournaments, we couldn’t add a single feature that either we wanted or you wanted and it was only a matter of time before it collapsed.

You don't agree?
Many of you may remember the launch of GamesTV.org "2.0". The whine was huge - hardly any new features, ugly new design, ugly banners and logos, not worth all the trouble. Sounds familiar? We did there what we're now doing here. Rebuild the page from scratch, release when the featureset is just exceeding the one from the livepage and then let the page grow with the community. Can't really remember any updates since gtv2 was released? Think again.
Large portions of what you see there was induced by the community.

Articles - The summary in this is only a couple px in height, but it still uses up the whole "column". The text should flow underneath it and then use all the available width.


So obviously CF4 had a rough start, overloading the server with a couple of bottlenecks followed by session issues and infinite redirect loops - but it's under control! The site is usable, up until now - to me - it feels more responsive than cf3 did since I came home today and everything is running fine.

So enough about this, read on if you want to move on and see what Crossfire 4.0 can and will do for you.

(Little service announcment: if you still have trouble with your session - getting "you need to be logged in" erros and such - clear all cookies with "crossfire.nu" in the domain part, that'll solve it)