[HoundDawg]

Starting a game server for the first time isn't always easy. Most game developers fail at providing server admins adequate enough support. This is where UnitedAdmins fills the gap between developer and admins, by providing necessary reference and how-to information and offering different support options.

The only way UA is able to do this successfully, is with the help of community volunteers. These volunteers are, or have been, server admins and are able to share their experiences and pass on their knowledge.

Interested in helping out? Then register in these forums and reply to this thread with a little information about yourself, the games you have experience as an admin, and in what areas you'd like to contribute.

Thank you!

[ColdSun]

General Information
Name: Logan Mathews
Notes: I discovered United Admins originally through HHole.com which was using HLStats. When United Admins aquired the project, I naturally became rather interested and consistently frequented *rarely posted* the HLStats and HLGuard forums.

I'd personally be honored to participate in the UA revival project in anyway needed.

Past Game Community Experience
Service: MPlayer
Role: Sage
Brief Description: A sage was a pool of community volunteers who were selected out of the Wizard pool to help manage and run Mpath's events and support the community on the Mplayer service (later acquired by Gamespy). I primarily frequented the Quake1 lobbies and spent most of my time answering questions related to early mod development.

Service: MPlayer
Role: Wizard
Brief Description: A wizard was a volunteer position created by MPath for its Mplayer service to not only help new players but also a mentoring system to help them improve in particular games. Being a heavy Quaker, I focused most of my energy helping new players learn the ropes.

Service: Ultima Online
Role: Counselor
Brief Description: A position originally established by Origin Systems (and later EA) to create a front line of support while maintaining low cost. Counselors were often able to address issues which would of otherwise needed an employee's interaction.

Service: Ultima Online
Role: Senior Counselor
Brief Description: In addition to helping address in-game issues, Senior Counselors were also charged with training new Counselors, answering Counselor questions, and addressing issues which required more in game interaction.

Service: Ultima Online
Role: Seer
Brief Description: The role of a Seer, unlike the Counselor positions in UO were composed of highly respected members of the role-playing community and were delegated the task of creating and managing ingame events ranging from simple town invasions to full blown game altering events.

Service: Ultima Online
Role: Companion
Brief Description: The Companion role, similar to the Seer role, was based on a selection of experienced players charged with the task of introducing new players to the world of Ultima.

Service: UOShack
Role: Administrator / Developer
Brief Description: Originally the premiere bug site for Ultima Online, I was hired to not only continue PHP development of the site but also with bug submissions and building an interactive community. Roughly 4 years of active maintenance.

Service: MarkeeDragon.com
Role: Bug/Exploit Administrator
Brief Description: Due to my popularity in the Ultima Online community and UOShack, MarkeeDragon requested my assistance in maintaining a game bug database but also handling community issues.

Service: GamesNet/GameSurge
Role: Support Staff
Brief Description: Besides the frequent channel registration requests, I managed typical irc user issues ranging from channel disputes to irc & tcl scripting questions.

Service: Krypt.com
Role: Tech Support (Forums / IRC / PHP / Counter-Strike)
Brief Description: Originally a customer of Krypt.com, I later begame good friends with the owners and eventually started handling many of the support questions ranging from how to setup a server, to recommended linux and windows tweaks to get the most out of their services.

In addition to the previous service experiences, I have roughly 10 years of experience with phpBB, and 2 years of Drupal.

[HoundDawg]

ColdSun, thanks for stepping forward! I may have over 10 years PHP experience, but I'm a total n00b when it comes to Drupal. I've asked Banana to install it, which he has some experience with it (at least more than I). So, we'll need all the Drupal experience we can get in order to making it a successful install and a great opportunity for UA going forward.

[ColdSun]

Fantastic. I'd imagine that you would be deploying Drupal 6 as Drupal 5 will be EOLed when D7 is released later this year. Perhaps later we can discuss what kind of Drupal features you would be interested in and I could supply a module analysis as at times there is many modules which offer similar feature sets.

[HoundDawg]

ColdSun, on 25 May 2009 - 10:19 PM, said:

Fantastic. I'd imagine that you would be deploying Drupal 6 as Drupal 5 will be EOLed when D7 is released later this year. Perhaps later we can discuss what kind of Drupal features you would be interested in and I could supply a module analysis as at times there is many modules which offer similar feature sets.

Yes, it's Drupal v6. Let's talk more about Drupal plans in the website forum here:
http://forums.united.../13-ua-website/

[mauirixxx]

General Information
Name: Rick Payton
Age: 34

It's been a long time since I discovered UA - found while researching how to tweak hlds (I found what HD refers to as v1 of UA I think). The more projects that came to UA, the more I ended up hanging around. I've had a ton of awesome experiences in being a UA member, and around 2005 I started contributing more to the forums in the HLstats forum, trying to help other users (since banana was pretty mucht he only guy offering support at the time).

ColdSun said:

I'd personally be honored to participate in the UA revival project in anyway needed.

Quoted because I feel the same way.

Past Game Community Experience
heh none. I just know how to make stuff work, and assist other people in making it work. I've added content to Daitengu's old ServerWiki project, so I know how to work a wiki, and I even rolled my own walkthrough on installing hlstats (and hlstatsx) - it may not have been pretty (web design is NOT my forte), but it got the point across completely and accurately. Unrelated to gaming, I even made a walkthrough for running uTorrent as a service that got stickied in the official uTorrent forums (oooohhhhhh hahaha my small internet claim to fame).

@coldsun - that's a hell of a resume dude

[ColdSun]

mauirixxx, on 26 May 2009 - 08:08 PM, said:

@coldsun - that's a hell of a resume dude

Thanks . What can I say other than I'm incredibly passionate about my hobbies.

[Banana]

in the future I will creata a page at the website where the UA members can write about themself.

just to get someting to indentify with.

[mauirixxx]

there's already 2 places where members can do this, in their forum profile and if they make an account (or get it automatically made / linked in the futre via mediawiki <-> ipb bridge) on the wiki, they can do it there also. The forum profile though seems better suited, as it's very ... how would I say it ... facebook'ish.

[Banana]

yeah but if we use the profile here, you have to know the members.
eg. go to the members bar and filter for UA members and then click on each member to see the profile.

so a website with on which are only UA members are listed without the need to search for them, and just a click away from their profile is way better.

also limit this to one place.

The information on this webpage would be something more than just some profile.
A place where every can individually write something. This way ppl can identify UA with someone and it will not just a community...

[mauirixxx]

It comes down to forum groups then. Look on someones profile, you can add comments to them if they have enabled comments in their profile.

SO we make a "UA Admin" group and a "UA Staff" group (or just a singular group that encompasses anyone that's a part of UA oin some "official" manner), which does NOTHING more then link certain forum members to a group, make the group membership list publicly viewable and there you go. Quite easy, provided IPB offers that functionality - which if they made the forum member profile pages act like Facebook, then the above functionality should be in there too.

[Banana]

mauirixxx, on 27 May 2009 - 10:57 AM, said:

It comes down to forum groups then. Look on someones profile, you can add comments to them if they have enabled comments in their profile.

SO we make a "UA Admin" group and a "UA Staff" group (or just a singular group that encompasses anyone that's a part of UA oin some "official" manner), which does NOTHING more then link certain forum members to a group, make the group membership list publicly viewable and there you go. Quite easy, provided IPB offers that functionality - which if they made the forum member profile pages act like Facebook, then the above functionality should be in there too.

well will look into this. and since I do not use facebook (yeah thats true) I can't say if the forum profile is good or not.

[mks]

well, old-timers know me (most of them)...

so, the name's Mihkel Sirel (please do call me mks, my name's a pretty good tongue-twister for people outside Estonia), previously did some different things for the old UA (including localization, some content-writing and so on)... I'd be more then glad to help out with content (news, manuals, whatever) writing and content management... don't have any programming experience as such... in regards to the skill set for the previous task, I believe that I can speak and write English on a native level...

and of course, the mandatory bragging...

[Banana]

mks, on 31 May 2009 - 10:17 PM, said:

well, old-timers know me (most of them)...

so, the name's Mihkel Sirel (please do call me mks, my name's a pretty good tongue-twister for people outside Estonia), previously did some different things for the old UA (including localization, some content-writing and so on)... I'd be more then glad to help out with content (news, manuals, whatever) writing and content management... don't have any programming experience as such... in regards to the skill set for the previous task, I believe that I can speak and write English on a native level...

and of course, the mandatory bragging...

hello again ;-)

[infused]

I am a young professional software developer.

I know about UnitedAdmins because they developed an anti-cheat program (Hradba) for a game called Vietcong.

I have been a server admin for Vietcong for a while now, and a player as well. I understand a lot of things an admin goes through and what a player goes through.

I am mainly interested in helping with the development of applications for Windows, anything gaming related.

I could help a little with the website. I enjoy designing and building websites, and am currently self-learning Drupal, which I understand you guys are working with.

[Banana]

hello infused,

if you want to help, you can provide some content in the wiki.unitedadmins.com about Vietcong and help here in the forums about any question about it.
This will help us a lot.

we need the ppl back here first, before we can start anything new.

[Evan]

General Information
Name: Evan Ruffini
Notes: I originally joined UnitedAdmins to help support the gameserver community, then found myself whisked into the StatsMe / Lumen documentation project. I was with UnitedAdmins until it was no longer kept up, and I surprisingly found it was revived this morning.

I'd personally be honored to participate in the UA revival project in anyway needed and to provide any services deemed necessary.

Past Game Community Experience
Service: CHS 24/7 Assault
Role: Server Admin
Brief Description: I was a regular for awhile and then became an admin for the first time.

Past Game Community Experience
Service: 5.0 | CS Clan
Role: Clan Leader / Server Manager
Brief Description: I joined 5.0 roughly around 2002, helped recruit many more members and develop a community around it. We had a very popular WC3 server and an upcoming CAL team that we disbanded after a few members decided they were too good for everyone else. I kept 5.0 alive while the actual founders left, and it's still going strong today!

Past Game Community Experience
Service: OMGRP TSRP Community
Role: Community and Server Manager
Brief Description: When "The Specialists" mod introduced the Roleplaying plugins, my friends and I started the premier community for TSRP. We were the pinnacle of the TS roleplay community until the day we decided to shut it down because of the lack of support from the community at large. To this day, OMGRP is still known to those who play TS still. We even have a mention in the source code for the plugins.

Past Game Community Experience
Service: East Coast Gaming Network (GSP)
Role: Server Support Technician
Brief Description: I started out in the 5.0 clan, and ended up volunteering to do some work for East Coast Gaming Network (our provider at the time). After a few months I was given the opportunity to do technical support for all the game servers. Even when the owner of ECGN went MIA, I handled billing and server support nearly by myself for dozens of servers. At our prime we competed directly against GameDaemons, GriffinRUN, and Art of War Central. We didn't compromise any part of our network. After the company was taken over by new owners, I still worked for ECGN and helped transition it from a GSP to a VOIP (Ventrilo/TS) provider where we have thousands upon thousands of active accounts today.

Past Game Community Experience
Service: Defender Technologies Group
Role: Network / Operations Engineer
Brief Description: As the parent company of East Coast Gaming Network, Defender Technologies Group (DTG) also owned several other companies, such as PowerVPS.com. I was asked to work for the parent company as I was technically proficient in server support. I ended up working in the NOC of our primary and secondary datacenters as an operations engineer. I was responsible for day to day operations, maintenance and support of all our servers; internal and customer owned. I worked for the company for over 2 years and dealt with Linux (CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu) and Windows based servers.

Past Game Community Experience
Service: SuXoRs Gaming Community ( http://www.suxorsgaming.com/forums )
Role: Owner and Community Manager
Brief Description: While working for DTG, I took over responsibitilies of my coworkers community after he left the company. Fast forward 2 years and the community, Suxors Gaming, has grown from a single CS server to multiple active servers, thousands of players, and more than just CS. We are a fast growing and medium sized community that is constantly expanding and looking for new ways to provide gamers a fair, clean, and fun gameplay. We pride ourselves in our mature environment on our forums, our zero tolerance for bullshit attitude, and the quality of gameplay we provide.

[Banana]

Evan, on 03 June 2009 - 07:32 PM, said:

General Information

I'd personally be honored to participate in the UA revival project in anyway needed and to provide any services deemed necessary.

well just have a look around.
spread the word, use the UA steam group and fill the wiki.

[HoundDawg]

So great to see familiar people coming back to help us rebuild UA to a state that is far better than what it used to be! Thank you everyone!

Yeah, like Banana mentioned, don't wait for some "official" political crap... if you see something that could use more content or support... take care of it or ask someone (if you don't have permission for some reason).

[SirSquidness]

Greetings!

I am Chris. You may call me... Chris.

I just stumbled here earlier this evening from a link in the HLDS mailing list. Reading through the history page in the wiki, I'm quite surprised I didn't stumble here on one of the old versions of the site. I could have used a resource like this quite a few times over the past few years.

My expertise lies more in running of LAN events than game servers, but I do do quite a bit of tinkering with game servers, especially in TF2 and Left4dead. I've been running 40+ person LAN events for the past 3 or 4 years, managing network, power and servers (and sometimes it seems like everything else as well), and am also involved in running the TF2 tournament at a large (400+ person) LAN in my local capital city. I've recently started hosting a few game servers on a mate's server as well, running TF2 and ricochet, with L4D and CS: S sitting there waiting for a rainy day.

I'm mainly a windows boy, but I've recently started dabbling in linux (it helps that said mate's server is running Debian).

Despite the fact my 'resumé' is a lot less impressive than the others in here, I'd be happy to help out, perhaps write up a few guides, keep the forums active, etc. I don't think I have any skills that aren't already covered, but hey, I might learn something even if all I do is hang around.

See you 'round the forums and IRC.