Welcome to the eternal tomb of merchantguild.net. This is supposed to be a memorial site to give people nostalgia among other things as they view posts/images made almost a decade ago! At least, it should be that, but the site isn't working correctly.

Sorry for the site not working correctly, we just moved to a new server to save money at the cost of functionality. This loss of functionality meant I had to manually upload everything to the new server instead of doing a server to server transfer. The database scheme is also different. The result is this has somehow broken the forums. Oops. I'll be working on it during the next week or so, so please be patient.

UPDATE 08-29-2009 7:02pm PST:
The ~USERNAME -> user/USERNAME shortcuts have been fixed! Well, kind of. It now automatically rewrites all URL requests to the new URL http://www.merchantguild.net/users/USERNAME instead of hiding it at http://www.merchantguild.net/~USERNAME . It's not the solution I wanted (I wanted hiding), but it fixes all references to the server for now, and should do. I'll work on trying to re-impliment the hiding solution later after the other problems have been fixed.

I'm at a crossroads here: On one hand, I've been able to successfully convert the forums to run on phpBB2, on the other hand it's crippled and will require serious work to make it act and look like the old forums. Currently, it also drops all data like the moods of the posters, and all polls, and messed up groups too. Since the site is supposed to be a nostalgia site, this obviously isn't acceptable, but the question is: Will it be more efficient for me to try to recode the old forums to work correctly, and then work on a new forum solution over time to make sure it goes right, or should I try to just temporarily set up the converted forms, even though they'll look nothing like the old ones and will lose most of their data, plus all the work down the road to try and convert the old lost data into the new forum on the fly. I've put my 12 hours in today, by tomorrow I'll look at seeing how complicated it would be to just fix the old forums.

By the way, we have loads of user ftp accounts and webspace I gave out years ago. Most people stopped using them long ago, but for anyone that wants to use their account again, I will gladly update your access. Please e-mail me (see below) to regain your access. I may eventually delete all non-updated accounts, time will tell.

I'm working on the oekaki too. The old oekaki was buried under comments from spambots and was useless, so I had to delete it and remove everything except the pictures. I saved the pictures (but sadly not the animations or comments, so I don't even know who made which picture!) and you can view it below:

Click here to see the archived oekaki images!

I'm working on installing a new oekaki. I might write a script that will manually upload all the archived oekaki images back into it. Anyway, the new oekaki is set up, if you feel like, please give it a whirl by registering and attempt a drawing. I'll be working on it.

Click here to try the new Oekaki

Thankfully the site doesn't get a lot of traffic, so this isn't a big problem, but I wish I was more able to handle these issues. Part of the reason the restore is going so slow is that Urakh/Rishi isn't here to help with the process. When he returns from his vacation, I imagine he'll help out. I hope to have a solution to all the problems (even if they are temporary solutions) by September 6th.

If anyone needs to contact me, I can be reached on AIM as "gengriffin", and at ichibanMuffin@gmail.com

-ichibanMuffin / Hikaru Shidou