Well, February has come and gone and for most of us, including myself, I'm very glad it is over. Around RFGen, things got hairy for a bit and the site was down for several days. While the monthly thanks is normally a time to express our gratitude to our highest submitters and most dedicated approvers, I'd like to start off this post by thanking those who worked tirelessly and diligently to get our site up and running again. Without your hard work and countless hours, many of us would have lost the database information which houses our collections and the continual updates that many of us have worked so hard to put together. But most importantly, I thank you for saving a community where great people meet to share ideas on gaming and enjoy being members.
Continue reading RFG Thanks: February 2012
When RFGeneration was first established, all entries were originally submitted per supported region - North America, Europe, and Japan. These older entries have not been a large problem for North America and Japan. However, as many European collectors are aware, there are MANY regional variations for software in Europe.
Before the outage, I was working on an ambitious project: fixing the regions for the European PS2 database. A majority of European PS2 releases are not Regionwide, and in fact usually have packaging clearly marked for their supported regions/languages. This makes them a great first step towards slowly removing the erroneous Regionwide releases we have in our database. I had addressed 95% of the titles in the database and was slowly working towards adding new regional releases to the database when the outage occurred, which meant that all of my work was lost.
This, unfortunately, means I'm back where I started. Fortunately, Bildtstar and Sirgin were quite helpful in providing scans and helping me update a majority of the database previously, which was a great help at the time. Their scans were recovered and the appropriate entries modified/added, which gives me a decent headstart into this project.
What does this mean for European PS2 collectors?
This, unfortunately, means that you'll likely have to audit and update your collections. Many of the releases already had regional information tied to them without reflecting the appropriate region, and were subsequently updated. Other releases did not have enough information to properly update and were subsequently deleted. Where there was once a Europe (Regionwide) title may now be a Spain or Netherlands title because of the information previously supplied.
If you notice something in your collection doesn't match the information for any current entries in the database, please submit a new regional variation for it here! If you need help figuring out what the variation should be, please post in the Announcements/Feedback Forum.
Regional Guidelines for PlayStation 2 Software
- Information will be taken from the back of the box. We will not accept any submissions without a proper region or UPC. Please specify the region based on the country flag on the back of the box. If there is no country flag, the languages should be the determining factor. DO NOT USE THE QUICKSTART COUNTRIES AS A REFERENCE.
Countries to specify for languages:
- Danish (Denmark)
- Dutch (Netherlands)
- English (United Kingdom)
- Finnish (Finland)
- French (France)
- Greek (Greece)
- Hungarian (Hungary)
- Italian (Italy)
- Norweigian (Norway)
- Polish (Poland)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
- Russian (Russia)
- Slovak (Slovakia)
- Spanish (Spain)
- Swedish (Sweden)
Important note: As most of you reading this now know, we were hacked in February and had our databases deleted. And thanks to our fantastic staff of programmers, bickman2k, TraderJake, and St0rmTK421, we were able to recover most of our DB info. Unfortunately, we still lost two entire month's worth of submissions. Which in the grand scheme of things isn't a ton of information, but I know everyone that added anything to our DB in that time feels the pain of losing it. And I apologize for this loss and everyone should know that we're taking measures now so that a loss of information like this won't happen again.
So, thanks to dsheinem's blog post on how to recover our lost blog entries, here is December 2011's RFG Thanks. Now, keep in mind that everything mentioned here is now absent from the DB, but we still appreciate the hard work you put in in not only in December but also January for which an RFG Thanks had not been written when the site went down.
Can you believe that not only has another month come and gone, but another year? Time is just flying by and we're trying our best to keep up with all the submissions this month and year.
December 2011 saw an excellent 3,491 submissions, which just goes how many of our members would rather spend time working on our DB than spending time with their families during the holiday season. The biggest of our submitters in December was Bildstar with an incredible 1,476 submissions, almost half of the month's total! Rounding out the top five submitters, all with over 100 submissions were Shadow Kisuragi, blcklblskt, raffa1985, and NES_Rules. Thank you guys for making this a great end to 2011 and thanks to everyone else who submitted during the last month of 2011.
And of course, we have to thank our excellent staff of dedicated reviewers, especially our top reviewers, Shadow Kisuragi and Paully3433 with 1648 and 737 approvals respectively.
Now, you've seen what our staff and members have been up to month to month, but you're probably curious what we've done all year long. And its nothing short of amazing. Our group of members and staff from across the world have made 52,058 submissions this year! That's an average of one submission every ten seconds!
Of the 236 people who made a submission in 2011, there are obviously some who stand out from the crowd, in all, there were 13 people who made over 1000 submissions. And they are Tynstar (12,102 submissions), Shadow Kisuragi (4,517), Izret101 (4,029), aeroc (3,783), blcklblskt (2,996), Bildstar (2,583), NES_Rules (2,444), y2richie (2,254), raffa1985 (2,100), ApolloBoy (1,884), Necron99 (1,390), Fuyukaze (1,085), and ixtaileddemonfox (1,009). Thank you all, you are what makes RF Generation so special!
If you don't see your name up, why not try to get it up for 2012? As long as the world doesn't end before 2013, you'll get to see your name up here on the front page if you make enough submissions. And even if you don't make the list, you can still know that your submissions are appreciated and your name will forever be listed on the game's page.
And on a final note, I'd like to announce a new member of the staff. You can bet he was on of our top submitter's in 2011 and has a special knack for that 64-bit Nintendo console. That's right, none other than blcklblskt is now on staff as a DB Contributor. His first mission is to get that N64 section of the DB fleshed out and squeaky clean, so wish him luck, or better yet, why not help him out and make a few submissions for the N64 section!
MySQL did not play nice tonight. We learned a valuable lesson about our server and trying to optimize mySQL tables. Long story short, don't do it unless you shut down the site.
So, the forum got screwed up... again. If you are affected by the forum screw up, I must extend my apologies. But, the forum is back up, using a backup from yesterday to restore order to the messages and topics.
It actually seems like everything that is an Innodb table got restored back to the original configuration. It would make sense that Innodb tables got screwed up as it was Innodb that crashed. Sadly, that means not just the forum reverted, but as some members have already pointed out, the collections have reverted back too.
We are very much trying to keep the site from doing this. We are doing daily backups to ensure all keeps going well. It pains us when this occurs. We all put so much time and effort into this site to make it our community. We will get this site back in tip top shape. The hackers may have taken us down, but we are not out. We will get through this.
Glad to see RFGen back up and running! Thanks to the whole crew for working so hard to bring back the site!
If you're like me, you lost a few recent blog posts in the restoration to a December 2011 backup, and I thought I'd share with you how you MIGHT be able to get them back.
Step 1. Open Firefox (you can probably use Chrome, IE, etc. - but the instructions here are with Firefox)
Step 2. Search Google for the titles/topics of your recent posts and/or of your blog itself. Use your best Google-fu to locate your missing entries in Google's listings.
Step 3 (**the most important step**). Hover your mouse over the Google result for your entry until a double arrow appears to the right of the listing. Hover over the arrow until an image of the RFGen site appears to the right of the arrow (it may or may not look like your missing entry). Click on the "cached" link above that image. The page you get to should look something like this.
Step 4. Select the text and images from your entry with your mouse, and then right click to "View Selection Source". Copy the source code that pops up in the little window.
Step 5. Open the RFGen blog entry creation tool, retype your title/tags, and paste the source code into the "News Body" Field. Preview and then publish your post!
Potential Additional Step 1. If you have highlighted words in your entry (carried over from Google's cached results), you will need to undo the formatting. I found it easiest to use the "replace" function of my word processor to make these adjustments to the source code, then I copied/pasted the fixed code back into the "News Body" Field.
Potential Additional Step 2. You can also copy the source code of the comments from the cached version of the page and post them (as one comment) in the comment field of your revised entry.
Good luck to everyone in bringing back their content. Ask below or shoot me a pm/email, and I will be glad to help you if you get stuck!
Well, here we are, back up again. After over a week of downtime, we feel that we are ready to give this another shot as well as explain what had happened.
Last month, we were informed that our server was hosting a PayPal scam site. Our host was working with us to close up the exploit. It seems that whoever got in may have used more than an exploit. I found a couple of new domains on the server that were not set up by us. After further investigation, it was thought that they had the root password to the server. This fear was confirmed when the site went down.
Our initial check led us to the fact that our database tables had been dropped. That's bad.
[img width=423 height=315]http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lklne4CZne1qh7oxso1_500.png[/img]
This effectively removed our forum and game databases. We have been working to try to restore the forum from the information that was left on the server, but after all of the effort, we were stuck. Eddie was able to get the game database back from early December. This also included the blogs. The forum, however, was not so lucky.
The initial forum restoration that we found was from 2009. This included the member table. I happened to attempt to make a backup back in January, but it only partially backed up. Fortunately, this was successful in including the member list and even PMs. So, while we have now lost a ton of the forum, that can be recreated. The important part is that we were able to recover a fairly recent backup of the game DB and almost all of our members (not sure how many registered in the few weeks since my backup).
Now what happens? This experience has certainly left an impression on me as well as Dave, Eddie, and Mike. We will be implementing means to do (starting off) biweekly backups and as we get things honed in, we hope to get this down to possibly daily. We will also be working to have a system in place to test these backups and make sure they are good to prevent this sort of downtime in the future as well as making it easier for us to move hosts in the future should we need to do so.
We are very sorry that this has happened and that it was down for so long. We hope that it hasn't tarnished our image for you and that you continue to come back. Personally, I appreciate everyone that came in to the IRC room during the down time to keep the conversation going and your words of encouragement really meant a lot. The community has always been fantastic here and now that we're back up, I hope we continue to get stronger as a result. Thank you for your patience with me and my stubbornness to try everything I could to try to get it back to where it was before the disaster struck.
Welcome back to Channel 3!
November is already over? Time sure does fly, and another month brings a ton of new submissions to this place we call home. Just how many submissions occurred? Well, November brought exactly 4866 new submissions to the site. Of those, we had 1299 new images added to the site! Talk about a great month! You all were kicking butt with submissions!
Of course, one of you truly was the top submitter in November. That distinction goes to NES_Rules with 1304 submissions! Sure, he may be the Site Director but that does not mean he can't take top prize! Oh wait... sure it does. The top non-staff submitter was Bildtstar with 1025 submissions! That's more submissions than any staff member other than that certain Site Director!We also wish to thank Bildtstar for assisting with expanding our European PS2 database. It's appreciated, and we also appreciate everyone who submitted. We are truly grateful for all submissions, and though we can't thank each and every user we would like to at the least thank those users that submitted more than 100 things: Shadow Kisuragi, Tynstar, ApolloBoy, raffa1985, Necron99, and Alabama Shrimp. Thanks again to all made submissions in November!
Of course, member submissions are meaningless if people do not exist to approve them. I'd like to thank Shadow Kisuragi for being our top approver this month. He approved 1149 of the submissions. That's a lot. Of course, Paully3433, ApolloBoy, and Tynstar also helped with approvals, and it's appreciated!
So, December is here! Do you feel the Holiday Cheer? Here's to a great month of submissions!
[img width=480 height=640]http://i.imgur.com/d2NMZl.jpg[/img]
A while back I started collecting issues of PSM, which is one of my favorite PlayStation magazines. I suppose it's the "100% independent" part of it -- the idea that the views may be a bit more unbiased than those coming form Official PlayStation Magazine. Or maybe it's just how cool a lot of the cover art was. Who knows? But with Black Friday's arrival, I felt the urge to look back at the 2002 Holiday Buyer's Guide issue... from 2002. So let's see what PSM was urging everyone to shove under the tree 9 years ago, shall we?
Continue reading PSM: Holiday 2002, Issue 66
Sorry for the site downtime last night. I was editing the database directly and looking for a Variation Tie-in that I wanted to delete. Instead of deleting the one particular tie-in though, I ended up deleting every Variation Tie-In! When I tried to fix it, the server freaked out and died.
Fortunately, Dave (TraderJake) and Eddie (St0rmTK421) were able to properly restore the Variation Tie-Ins from an old backup and bring the site back online. Unfortunately, the data backup for this was from February, which means that we've lost a total of ~4500 tie-ins.
I'm going to talk with Dave and Eddie on how we can prevent this from happening in the future. In the meantime, I'll work on updating all of the tie-ins in the database over the next month while in my own little corner of shame...
Sorry for the inconvenience, everyone.
- Shadow
 I know it is only Thanksgiving in the US, but I still want to wish all a happy Thanksgiving, be you American or not. For those of you that are, may the Turkey be plentiful and tasty.
On a completely different note, the Type of Release field is has been added to our database. At this time, you cannot see it on games or hardware pages because this is a mandatory field that will allow users to filter out entries they feel are extraneous from the database. Many users feel that RF Generation has grown beyond the original scope of the site. For those that feel that way, while we cannot undo the major changes in scope, we hope that this addition will help those that feel the database has grown to be unwieldy.
Please help our staff set types of release for all entries. Please note if you make any edit to the database you will be required now to also set the Type of Release field if it is not set. I must stress again that this field is mandatory.
Should you come across any major technical glitches with this please PM me about the glitch. Any questions or comments about the actual content of the field should be directed to a DB Editor or Mike.
I hope you enjoy this new addition, and oh yeah, Keep it on Channel Three.
-Your Friendly PHP Programmer
The holidays are fast approaching, and I thought I'd bring up something for the RFGeneration members to try this year: Secret Santa!
All that would be needed is to put your name on a list of interested members and opt in/out for international shipping. At that point, a list would be needed for items you would be most interested in, along with reasonable items if your aspirations are quite high (I'm not sending you Cheetahmen II, Crabby!). Shipping information would also be needed.
During the first week of December, you'll be matched up with another forum member here and be sent their shipping information and list of interests. Traditionally, trading items from your collection is desired, but feel free to go wild on what you send. It doesn't have to match exactly what the person is asking for, as long as it's done in the spirit of the holidays. General value is the items should be around $20, but I won't stop you if you send more.
Contacting a member about their wants/interests will be done through a neutral third party so that the person sending the gift won't be identified until after the holidays (or never, if they so wish!).
Is anyone interesting in doing this? I've done it on Digital Press for 2 years, and had a blast doing so. We won't be able to go all out like they do on their forums for the entire month, but I figured it would be a great way for people to receive new and interesting things in their collections and meet their fellow
[img width=330 height=304]http://i.imgur.com/3VlzN.jpg[/img]
So for some reason I started thinking about PS2 games that could go online. I decided to start researching which ones might still have their servers online, and I found a pretty awesome site: http://www.ps2onlinegaming.com/ which is apparently still pretty active. I also did some poking around elsewhere and found that it was quite possible for me to take my PS2 games online even using my 60GB PS3. Considering how many of us have large collections of PS2 games, I thought it'd be fun to organize an informative guide outlining the process of getting online, and which games are still online so that we can all try to play some last-gen games together live.
Continue reading PlayStation 2 Online Guide
Welcome to Season 2 of GameCenter CX. This season commemorates the beginning of full episodes, which include various segments besides the game challenges. In Season 2, new segments were added to this show, which include visits to game centers and featured game collections, as well as the original industry interviews from the first season.
This week's challenge features Atlantis no Nazo (Mystery of Atlantis), a game released by Sunsoft for the Famicom that was set to compete with Super Mario Bros. It contains 100 different stages, power ups, and warps. This video and the Challenger video later in the season were the ones that initially got me interested in GameCenter CX, so I'll be more than happy to discuss these!
Arino's Challenge: Clear Stage 100.
I hope everyone survived their Halloween night and didn't get too scared. While yesterday may have been frightening, October certainly wasn't scaring away our submitters this month. Not only did we have a good month here at RFGeneration, we had a record breaking month at RFGeneration! That's right, in October 2011, we had more submissions in one month than any other since we starting tracking submissions in November 2006. Our previous record was in May of this year with an amazing 9,587 submissions. So you better believe this month was OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!! In fact, RFG members made an astounding 12,790 submissions in just 31 days. Thank you to all of you who made that happen.
Now, we normally try to not single out any particular member for their submissions since they are all important in their own way, but this month special credit is due to Tynstar. Because, you see, 10,000 of the monthly submissions were made by him. That's right, in one month he alone submitted more than our entire community in any other month. He even celebrated his 7th year at RFGeneration this month, so its especially nice to see someone who has been around for so long still so active in the database. So if you see Tynstar around on the forums or in person give him a pat on the back, he really deserves it.
For the rest of you, you won't be overshadowed by Tynstar's accomplishments. There were 72 other members who made submissions this month, so thanks goes out to all of you. The rest of members who made 100 or more submissions in October was Shadow Kisuragi, Izret101, Necron99, ixtaileddemonfox, NES_Rules, douglie007, and raffa1985.
And of course, we have our dedicated team of submission reviewers, who have to sift through the thousands of submissions every month. Our top reviewers were Shadow Kisuragi, Tynstar, and Paully3433.
If you're wondering what all these fine people were making so many submissions for, they were adding 884 images, adding 222 games, adding 50 hardware pieces, and editing 11,418 game pages.
Thanks everyone who made this record breaking month happen.
Happy Halloween everyone!
Enjoy the quick video I snapped of everyone doing the Time Warp at our annual Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast. In case everyone's not aware, language may be NSFW. Enjoy your holiday!
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