Earlier this round, we had a hacker get in and mess up a lot of things. It took me a while to "undo" all that was done. I will never understand why someone would want to purposely hurt the game and the community. This game is a free game that I pay for out of pocket so we all have a place to enjoy, away from regular life. Our community is small and I have always felt that out of all other gaming sites, our community is unique. We have always been "closer" than other communities so when someone does something like that, it bothers me. Instead of reaching out and saying hey, I know where there is a loophole and know how to help you patch it, they just expose it and hurt the game/community.

As you also know, for many months I have been working on testing the game to work with the modern PHP versions. We have tried a lot of different ways however sadly, the only way to make it work is to re-write the game with modern PHP scripts. That is a ton of work and for our small player base, not sure it's worth it. Then add in the hacking and it only discourages me more from spending the time. During the testing, I purchased the newest VB5 forums. The VB5 forums will only work on servers with the higher PHP versions. They made a ton of changes in the new forums and I REALLY like the new features as well. They renamed a lot of the tables so I would also have to make a lot of changes in the game in order for it to work with the new forums. Again, I just don't know if it's worth it or not.

The current host for our game has been asking me to update the game to the newer PHP versions as our game is the only thing left on their "old server". Sadly, over the weekend I was finally able to determine that it won't work. I'll talk to them about the options we have and go from there. I honestly don't want to close the game down. I would like to keep it going for as long as possible. I also wanted to invest some money into advertising to see if we could get some more players this year.

So, as it stands right now, the game WILL continue and there WILL be a new round, next round. I"m NOT closing it down yet. Based on my calculations, it would take me about a year or longer to fully rewrite the game. I'm also looking at a company that handles the conversion to see how much it would cost for them to take care of it. We'll see and I'll let you know more as I know more.

As always, if you know of a loophole in the game, please let me know about it. I'm by far what one would consider a programmer. I learned what I could to get the game going. It's not my professional field and nor am I up to date on much of it. I simply figure out and learn as I go . Please don't take advantage of that and do things to hurt the game/community.

Thank you,
Mr President