So a few of us have been playing MapleStory again, as well as doing a bit more gaming on our PS3s, so I thought it might be a good idea to do some maintenance on the Moodoo website. Leaving phpBB installations out of date is exactly the sort of thing I used to chastise users for when I was helping to administer a friend’s machine that was essentially used for charity hosting, so I figured I’d better get off my butt and update.
The chief problem with keeping the software updated is the various Mods I applied to it break the automagic updater… so I decided “to hell with it”, I took an online backup of the database and just installed it again from scratch, then restored the backup.
Next I restored our modified eMuza theme, and re-edited it to remove the mods for SEO and the Portal, both of which I deemed unnecessary. I had to update a few of the images because the eMuza theme author messed something up with them (PNGs saved as .gif for example), and Firefox 3.5 really doesn’t appreciate such things. After messing around with that for a while, I made a discovery which I got really excited about but no one else seems to get.
Playstation finally got their heads out of their asses and gave us proper web integration with PSN! That means that on our forums, where users enter their PSN ID, I can now have it link directly to their profile where you can see their games, trophies, levels, etc. For an example, you can view my PSN Profile.
Hopefully they keep moving in this direction because I really like game systems that help bridge the gap between communities and the games they play.
My sole wish that I have left is the ability to run dedicated servers for different games (which is probably more a product of the game publishers than SCEA themselves) – for example CoD4. I love that game to death, and PC users can create dedicated servers… however PSN games are full of users who create a room, only to disconnect 30 seconds later… users who vote off unpopular maps (I am a reasonably high level in CoD4 and I probably have enough minor digits to count the number of times I’ve played the ship level). If I could run a dedicated server for Moodoo players who play CoD4 on the PS3, I’d be in hog-heaven. 
