We are always looking for the hottest, newest and best Channels and RPs to spotlight here on Tel'Laerad. So, please, give us your vote for Channel and RP Spotlight in the comments. The winner will be featured in the Spotlight section here on the main page! We will accept votes throughout the month of February and post the results at the end of the month. Each month we will have a new Spotlight Channel and RP decided by you, the users!

The next tournament will be house poker with Croupier in #Poker. Sign ups end on February 18th, and as previously noted the bot is available for games and practice before then. The winner gets a vhost, a mention in the follow-up, and delicious cake. Leave a comment below to sign up! :D

A MUD, or multi-user dungeon, is a text-based, massively multiplayer shared world, which many people can play within. We've recently added one we recommend to our games list, FoxMUD, and I'd strongly suggest you try it out, whether you've played other MUDs before, or are giving them a try for the first time. Just connect with telnet to www.foxmud.com 4848, or use their Java-based client. We're not responsible for FoxMUD (that credit goes to their own fine staff), but we are sure it'll be entertaining, and provide yet another way for everyone around Tel'Laerad to do stuff with people they know.

For those fond of IRC, we have a channel on our IRC network at #FoxMUD for discussion of the MUD, mostly by other players around Tel'Laerad, accessible via the IRC link in our main menu above.

Additionally, we have a new poker bot available on our IRC network in #Poker, for everyone to play a quick (or long) game of poker with their friends, as a substantial step up from our old (but still running) Blackjack bot. There's no gambling involved, although people can agree whatever winning and losing conditions they like around the game.

Hey, I'm writing here on behalf of the IRC Maintenance and Development team and Owners here at Tel'Laerad. We're aware that while our website and other services in general have remained reliably online aside one scheduled downtime on New Years day, there's been a recent increase in brief issues with our IRC servers, causing brief splits on several nights in the same week in the worst cases, some involving some of our most populated servers.

While these are unavoidable due to the nature of the IRC protocol and its persistent connections, we can do better. Reliability is one of the core Goals of Tel'Laerad, and we take it seriously.

As such, we've been working on plans to decrease the count and severity of these; in the interest of openness, and to let everyone who might have noticed the increase in splits lately know not only that we're working on it, but what we're doing, I'm going to take a moment little while to outline some upcoming server upgrades and changes we're making to improve things.

1) Arcadia, one of the troubled IRCDs, is being relocated from Chicago to the Netherlands, removing duplication of servers in Chicago and increasing geographical spread in the process. The old server has been shut down, and will be started on its new home soon, a dedicated server with LeaseWeb, a provider recommended to us strongly for network uptime. The new server has been performing some peripheral functions for us in the last month, and has performed very reliably.

2) Elysium, one of our more reliable VPSes previously, is withdrawn from the network to be moved to a new datacentre with the host, and has remained withdrawn for a while due to delays with the move. We're hoping to get this back up in its new location. The host has historically been particularly good in their west coast location and the new datacentre looks to b of high quality; we'll find out.

3) The first two steps above are focused on removing one troubled server, and getting two more reliable servers into the pool. Unfortunately, however, the splits have been more spread than the single troubled server, so at the same time, we will be monitoring the other servers, and once those two are in, we will evaluate issues with the others, and whether any of these warrant relocation or removal, or other measures to improve reliability, and whether we want to relocate main services. One of these servers has already had upgrades performed by the host to replace an antiquated router, causing a number of the splits before New Year; the full effect of this has yet to be evaluated, although it seems to be an improvement.

I hope anyone concerned by the recent reversion from our previous "weeks without splitting" level of service can now understand that we are working on restoring that level, and what it is, exactly, we're doing. If anyone at all has any further questions, just pop into #help on IRC or email help@tellaerad.net. I hope to have these upgrades underway soon, and minimal or no disruption to the active network.

Happy New Year! I'd like to thank everyone for being with us so far, and helping make Tel'Laerad the place it is today. We wouldn't be here without you all. We're hoping that this next year will only get better for all of us. With the new year comes the end of some projects, and the start of some others, and I'm glad to announce some new improvements to Tel'Laerad.

Our new rolling system for our IRC network has been completed, and is now in use. Dice rolling, calculations, and character generation is now built into our IRC server software, and not provided by a separate service or bot at all. =Roll= replaces RPGServ, and dice rolls can now be performed using the /roll and /scores commands, instead of /msg RPGServ ROLL or /msg RPGServ SCORES. The in-channel commands work as normal, and all functionality of RPGServ have been replicated (and in some cases, added to) in the process. As a new feature, there are now channel modes and an extended ban type to restrict dice rolling, or block it entirely. We're glad to finally have this out, after months of development.

Additionally, outside our main IRC network, we are now operating Gate; an IRC-to-AIM/MSN/ICQ gateway at Gate.TelLaerad.net using the Bitlbee software, letting you connect to these services using your IRC client of choice, for all your chat (unless you use IM networks it doesn't support as well, of course) in one program. Just connect to Gate.TelLaerad.net on port 6667 with your IRC client, and enter /MOTD for instructions on registering and adding your accounts.

Finally, we have a new Nagios-based status monitoring system in place, replacing our old one and providing us with a number of new features... including the ability to provide up to the minute system status updates via a channel on our IRC network. So for those interested in knowing right away what happened when things break, or simply curious, we invite you to join #tl-status on our IRC network, where our bot Heimdall will report on events as they happen.

We have a number of new plans we'll be working on for the upcoming year, which we hope will make Tel'Laerad better than ever before. We'll let you know as soon as any of them are finished and ready to show.