COGS Bristol

I’ve updated the statistics for our IRC channel today. It’s been a fair bit longer than usual since the last update, sorry. I’ve added a few new ‘ranking’ thingies, and also added better IRC to HTML formatting. It now supports the IRC bold formatting codes, for example.

As always, check them out at http://www.cogsbristol.co.uk/stats/

10:00 – Team Fortress 2 (as it always happens anyway )

12:00 – Zombie Panic: Source (A free mod for the Source engine)

14:00 – Tournament begins, it will end at 18:30 and there are some utterly FABULOUS prizes up for grabs this time!

15:00 – Shattered Horizon

18:45 – Doctor Who showing

‘After Pizza’ – Defence Alliance 2 (A free mod for Killing Floor)

Shortlist (other games that are likely to be played):
Warcraft
CS:S zombie mod
Altitude
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
Unreal Tournament both 2004 and 3
Madballs

12:00 – IOS:S – (a free mod for the source engine)

15:00 – CS:S hide and seek mod

17:30 – TrackMania tournament – (with plenty of FABULOUS prizes to be won)

18:15 – Doctor Who showing

‘After pizza’ – PVKII

This timetable is fairly flexible, apart from the TM tournament and Dr Who, which will be starting at the time advertised.

As some of you may have noticed by the upcoming events we’ve had in the sidebar for the past week or so, we’ve been trying out a new events calendar system. This is now live, and ready for use.

The sidebar on the right of the page now has a quick list of the next few events coming up. There’s also a fully interactive calendar available on the Calendar page (also accessible via the tab bar at the top of this page). As well as an interactive calendar, this page also contains a link to our ICAL feed, should you wish to automatically sync this calendar with your mobile device etc. so that you need never miss another COGS event again!

• !help has been massively overhauled.  One might say it was more !helpful.  As well as help content being more accessible, you can now get help for a specific command before you try to use it by typing !help <name of command>
• !mod command has been introduced.  If stuff is going on in the channel which you don’t like, you can use this to attract the attention of a committee member or moderator to step in
• [request] A new per-user setting has been added, !set listnotify.  Use this to be notified when new game and/or event lists are created, even if you are offline.  Never miss a new list!
• Improvements to spam prevention
• [bug] In some situations, the bot didn’t respect the user’s messaging preference (PM or Notice). This is fixed
• Improved connectivity to some IRC servers

• We’ve decided to try out giving moderators more visibility in the channel. This led me to improve the usergroup system, so that we can add/remove people from groups (e.g. the moderators group) easily.
• Support for list maintainers has been added.  This allows committee to grant power to maintain a list to another user who would not otherwise have permission to edit any lists.  E.g. someone who isn’t on the committee may be ‘in charge’ of an event, and need to update description etc.
• !whois will tell you if a user is committee or moderator
• [bug] fixed problem where spam protection wouldn’t trigger until an extra message was sent, leading to some confusing situations..
• [bug] fixed problem where it would sometimes describe time as “1 hours” instead of “1 hour”
• [bug] fixed crash which could occur under rare circumstances (though it never did live) if someone was double-tempbanned
• [memo] check SQLite versions on new hosts before migrating

-WiFi

As those of you at last weekend’s LAN already know, I released the next of my Meet the Committee series at the LAN.  This time we Meet the Sysadmins. You can click on the video below a couple of times to go to the full page on youtube. Comments, ratings, and passing it onto like minded (TF2-crazed) friends would be most appreciated. Enjoy!

– WildFire

A minor COGSBot update is happening this evening.  Nothing incredibly exciting, mostly fixes and improvements, but I like to keep everyone updated with the world of COGSBot and what’s changing.

• Resurrected (and slightly improved) the !mani feature, offering a quick and easy overview of everyone running for committee positions at the upcoming AGM.  You can private message any committee member and ask them to add your manifesto to the list
• Added SSL support – the bot now connects to the network using an SSL link
• Improved integration with !lan (and added helpful easy-access committee view of liftee:lifter ratio)
• Improved code which checks if a user is identified with NickServ – on rare occasions the bot could conclude that someone was not (when they actually were…)
• Improved user online tracking code.  After netsplits, the bot could sometimes be left with the ridiculous notion that some users were offline, and so the bot would appear to ignore them!  This should not happen anymore
• Fixed a bug in the scheduler where two !reminders at exactly the same time would sometimes not trigger properly (thanks Wyrm for the report on that)

-WighFigh

Here it is!

12:00 – UT2k4 – (expect TDM, iTDM, TAM and perhaps carball, depending on people’s preferences)

15:00 – SWAT4 – (ask on IRC/Yell at the LAN if you don’t have it, there will be spare copies around but it’s quicker to get it before hand)

19:00 – Defence Alliance 2 – (Free mod for Killing Floor, which you can buy from steam)

(I also want to play Hidden:Source in the evening – everybody download that!)

For those of you interested in Supreme Commander, I suggest you get on down to the forum thread to organise a mutually suitable time – hopefully this way it doesn’t take over the entire LAN. Also check the forum thread out to see what other games are likely to be played throughout the day.

Almost all of you will have received some information regarding the AGM at the Union next week. Since a couple of issues relate directly to COGS, I thought I’d link to those particular ones here. You can find the full list of motions on the AGM page.

Firstly, there is a motion to change the name of all societies (Word document). This would mean that all societies would have to prepend “The University of Bristol Student’s Union” to their name, and our official acronym would change from COGS to UBSUCOGS, which is rather less snappy.

Rather more important for us is the draft motion to lobby the university to provide extra bookable rooms. Not many of our members, I believe, have heard of the plans for the University to take over entire fifth floor (and more) of the Union. All of our recent LANs have been on the fifth floor and there are no rooms that come close to the Avon Gorge for satisfying our LAN needs.
Consequently, if our society is to continue to provide frequent, cheap, well attended LANs as it has done, it is imperative that we find an alternative space in which to hold them – somewhere with internet access, bookable for at least an entire day at the weekend, multiple (or high power) power rings, adequate space, tables, chairs and control of lighting and temperature. This is quite a list of requirements, but as an active society (and the largest of its kind in the country, as far as we can tell) we should have some clout.

As an additional incentive, the Union promise things like free pizza and pound-a-pint for attending. Finally, one more proposal COGS members in particular may be interested in, Change the name of the AGM to SHAGFEST (PDF)