Hi all,

 I managed to get the server which hosts this site (and some others) swapped out for one with more ram (256k-->1gb, for the same price!), so as soon as I have some time I'm going to be moving the website over to the new server (and closing down the old one)... I hope more memory will mean better caching, and thus more performance (for the website, but also for the mail etc I do with it), and also the possibility to have more processes running (eg more slaves to serve pages etc)...

Downtime should be limited (don't know when yet) to the time needede for copying the necessary files and changing the dns record so it points to the new server (this means the url for the site will not change)....

After that I'll start thinking about upgrading the software to drupal 6, which is also supposed to speed things up, and solve some problems like with the new post notification....

Hey all,

I noticed secondseeker.com, a no-sleeze SL parcel "review" site, visited us and put up a nice article about us!

More in our article section, or at Secondseeker.com !!!

Hi all,

with the big winter festivities a-coming, and SL even having a winter festival, Babylonia can't stay behind!

We want to organize some winter activities, christmas, snow, new year's eve etc are the keywords here! So, if you have any idea's, can offer any help, want to let us know what you think of the ideas already brought forward, let us knowby reacting to this message...

some ideas:

• christmas market
• christmas treasure hunt
• iglo building contest
• ice skating

  oh,and before I forget: merry christmas, a Happy New Year, and a shiny easter!

Hi,

tragic news: it seems that our island is offline, I presume since yesterday evening. Since I guess nobody knows the reason (though it could have to do with no more payments coming in), I submitted a support request via the linden support thingy. If i receive any answer I'll let it know here.

Oscatel asked me if "pulling back" to orache would be the safe thing to do, but i'm not entirely sure, since I believe this land should have been payed by the same people pying the island... It could be used until (?) it disappears too though, at least it still is owned by the babylon landowners group.

Hi all,

the site has been offline for a while so I could upgrade the platform we use (called Drupal) to drupal 5.2. This was necessary because of some bugfixes and security patches. A quick test seems to show all is well after the upgrade, but should you find any (new) problems, please let me know!!

I will probably have to take the site offline a few times in the near future, to upgrade some modules (not part of the drupal core, but provide extra functionality).

You should now also no longer receive an update notification by email when somebody spams the site. This used to trigger an email, but when clicking the link you usually didn't see anything because the spamfilter had filtered out that message.
This does however may mean that you will get update notifications later then you used to.

For the people interested, here's why:

old behaviour:  read more »

Hello babylonian friends,

I came back two weeks ago. Has been an intense time. Plenty of experiences. Learning what Ishtar has showed to me about the very real life. I am still unable to explain, I need time to comprehend and accept everything.

I am restoring a way of life and way to earn money for a life. It is a bit time consuming. I think that I need a few weeks yet to have everything ready in real life to attend virtual activities.

In the meanwhile, please enjoy every minute of your life in Babylon, in our planet, because it is a wonderfull gift that most human beings cannot enjoy.

Thanks a lot, babylonians.

 Carmen

As many of you will have noticed by now, there is a lot of junk floating/lying/standing/buried/airborne in and around babylonia. In case you wonder, this is NOT the default look of our island .

We are however unable to clean all this up until carmen returns from holiday..... We tried to convince some people to come over and clean up their stuff (which some did - thanks to  those people), but others run as soon as approached .

The chat area is particularly hit by this wave of junk, so we mostly gather on other places at the moment. Please look for green dots on the map to find out where we are    read more »

Hello,As some of you already know, as a consequence of our computer hacking or cracking, and her credit card stolen, the person who pays babylonia told me that will not use her credit cards through internet any longer, therefore, if she doesn't change her mind, we would not keep sl-babylonia.Right now, I cannt commit on further payments as I still don't know my earnings in September. And I am also scared about hackers or crackers.Oscatel has suggested to downsize temporarily elsewhere if the current island finally closes.Maybe there are other options. As a first step, we could save our buildings into our inventories.I don't know how often I could access to internet until September, but I think I could use e-mail, at least from time to time. Please, e-mail me, and don't be scared if I don't reply soon. I will love to hear from you all. Thanks.Have great holidays and see you after them !

Lately, there appears to be some trouble in adding content (articles or events). I'm not entirely sure what causes it, but the symptoms seem to be that you recieve a php error message, and after that your article has been marked as spam by the spamfilter. Luckily your article hasn't disappeared after that, so it just needs some manual approvement (because it is falsely marked as spam). I'm not sure whether the problem is in the drupal part, or in the akismet (spamcheck) part.  read more »

A new invention is installed in babylonia: the teleport system!

It allows you to teleport to and from the most important places , or to make a tour by hopping from one(numbered) place to the next!
Look out for the numbered tiles, or click on a number on the map in the welcome & chat area!

It might still be a bit buggy here and there, and more features are to come!
If you have suggestions or find faults in it, please commenth ere or start a thread in the forum!

UPDATE2:

The problems seem to have been resolved, hurray! Now we only have to worry about the "normal" SL bugs

UPDATE:
I don't know about other people, but some small problems seem to remain: a texture here and there, and I still have some problems (but smaller) when i logon dorectly to babylonia... Please tell us if you have these kind of problems as well, eg by leaving a comment to this item!

some workarounds:  read more »

I tried to come up with a logo for the site, and after some fiddling around in the gimp i came up with this....

Please tell me your toughts about it (add a comment, or start a forum thread), do you like it, or not, why (not)..... etc

I also attached some bigger/higher quality versions, and there's a version at the point where you teleport in on the babylonia island!

UPDATE:

Google once again struck down on our site, and found a backdoor to clicking the arrows on our tasklist . This again causes many tasks to be seen as updated by the site. I adapted the robots.txt again, it should now no loinger happen. I can only wait untill the next crawl to verify this...
On the good side: we now have most of our pages in google: Click here to see our pages on google.  read more »

UPDATE:

It looks like the rollback has been completed, building should now be safe again.... or at least safer

It looks like the lindens have flooded babylonia (see attached pic for details)

Carmen requested a rollback of the island to restore it to the state it was in last saturday.
In the meantime, it's best not to build anything there at all, because your work might become lost!!!!  read more »

As you may have seen in the event list, the storytelling event that would take place tonight has been cancelled. See the event for more details. This event will probably take place some other time, this will be announced on the usual places.

Some new functionality to the website:  read more »

Slowly, the website is taking form, but lots still has to be done.

I could use some help with that:

-I'm currently looking for some graphically/webdesign talented people, to help form the look of this new website, which is based upon the powerfull and customisable drupal system... All help and ideas welcome!! I'm especially looking for a logo for the site. If you have any ideas or designs, feel free to contribute!

What's here already:
-possibility to sign up
-A basic forum, to discuss about SL babylon, this site, sl and life in general. Every registered user can post topics, any user can post reply's.
-The possibility to subscribe to news, forum topics, etc. This way, you will be notified when something is updated. Click the subscribe links to subscribe!
-A news posting system (like this message), so certain people can post updates, notifications etc about babylon, the website....
-A freetagging system: creators will be able to tag their content, and these tags will be shown in a tag cloud. This gives a quick overview of what content is here.
-RSS feeds: most pages have an orange rss icon... They allow you tu use RSS to track changes to one message, a category of messages, forums etc using your favorite rss reader.
- every subscribed user can contribute to our article database (articles about environment, healthcare, second life, ... These articles can then be discussed on this site or during the SL chat sessions
-some blocks with quick information about changes, so you can easily see what content is on the site.
-an editor, so you can more easily markup new stuff
-An event calendar, where every user will be able to post babylonian related events.  read more »