Greetings from rainy Langley outside of London, where I'm in town for a few days doing something almost, but not entirely, unrelated to Halo 2; something I hope to rectify in approximately 12 hours or so. In the meantime, of course, I returned to notice that the server logs had filled up the server's disk space, effectively closing the site; hopefully that won't happen again for... oh... at least another 24 hours or so.

For awhile now, registered users of Rampancy could enter in their XBL GamerTags in their profiles, by clicking the my account link under the lefthand menu for their username, and editing their personal information. Now, we have a way to actually use that information. First, you can see a list of our registered users, and if you like, you can see only those who have entered GamerTags.

Just a note: Rampancy.net has a feature called throttle that gradually disables site functions as traffic goes up, in order to prevent the entire thing from catching fire, falling over, and sinking into a swamp.

We tested it with the last Bungie Weekly Update we hosted, and while the site was unavailable for part of the night, generally we were pleased, and had less downtime while also being able to serve more users.

We missed it, but awhile back Bungie.net had an article on the new Theme Builder for the recently-revised 7th Column community site. The theme builder had been absent from the newly-launched site, but now it's back.

[image:8488 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]The Halo 2 Illustrated Guide that Rampancy began compiling last week, using images extracted from Halo2.com by akba and dogchow, has now been greatly expanded with the assistance of BOLL who provided even more images.

New sections have been opened:

[image:8374 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Two Halo 2-related additions to the site today. The first is the Halo2.com Decoded gallery; akba and dogchow produced translated texts for each of the images on the Halo2.com flash site, and superimposed the English text on the images to make it readable by all.

Free t-shirts not being enough to motivate Bungie.net's volunteer moderators to put in the long hours necessary to remove all the spoiler content from their forums, Bungie is now being forced to consdier closing their forums. Let Bungie know what you think by voting on this page. Thanks Louis Wu.

Today Rampancy.net was upgraded to version 4.5 of the Drupal Content Management System. Other than a few minor cosmetic changes, most users should not notice too much that is different. Here are some known changes and issues. Some we may be able to work on and fix, some we definitely will, and some we might not.

Xbox in the repair shop? Can't wait for Halo 2? Upset that BOLL hasn't produced a new Flash game lately?

If you've got a fair bit of time to spend while you wait, check out the Grunt Zone Flash game by Coke.

The viewers have voted, and Louis Wu at HBO has posted the verdict, that HBO's forums will remained closed until November 11, with 77.7% of voters supporting the closure. A moderated forum idea was discussed, but abandoned.

Louis Wu has put up a poll at HBO, asking whether the forum should stay closed until November 9, to avoid risking exposing users to spoilers from the pirated copies of Halo 2. Right now, the poll is running at a bout a 3.6:1 ratio for closed:open, so if you want the HBO forum to stay open, go vote.

Congratulations to icecoldman23 who became Rampancy's 3000th registered user!

Looks like the new Rooster Teeth Productions website has gone up, with neat new features, a slick new design, and information on Red vs Blue as well as new productions like The Strangerhood (machinima using the Sims engine). Thanks Rams at Halo Planet.