Preston Cyberdog found and Louis Wu posted an apparently poorly-hidden feature of the new Bungie.net site that offers to help you out if it looks like you don't know what you're doing.

It looks like the new Bungie.net forums are powered by IdealBB 1.5, a Windows-based online collaboration system developed by Ideal Science. (Their company is linked from the bottom of the forum pages.)

Users of the new Bungie.net site might find one thing to be problematic- linking their Xbox Live GamerTag. Although Bungie.net allows you to choose whether or not to display your GamerTag if it is linked, you can't actually link it there if it isn't already. To do that, you have to sign in to Xbox.com using the same Passport you use for Bungie.net.

Those of you with truly nothing better to do may remember that my Christmas wish to Bungie was a flexible statistics system, linked to Xbox Live, that would have hooks that external fansites could link to in order to develop their own customized leader boards.

Looks like the new-look Bungie.net is open now for real, and looks like there are a few things to poke around and find.

One is a new video called Can o'Whoop Ass; you can see it on the new videos page.

Well, Bungie.net isn't down anymore, but it does appear that something has changed. Loading the canonical names www.bungie.net or www.bungie.com now brings you to the Seventh Column site. The links for Truth and Reconciliation, the Myth Vault and the official Halo 2 site from that page seem to be down.

Frankie's thirteenth Bungie Update, originally at Sector 7, is now in our Halo 2 Updates Archive.

Achronos has posted on Bungie.net again about the site, which they expect to be down for perhaps as long as 6 hours on Monday morning starting at 8 Pacific. This covers all official Bungie websites.

If you had an account on the old Bungie.net system and want to link it to a Passport account so you can keep your nickname, you have been warned: your last chance to do so is before this Sunday at 5 PM. After that, the non-Passport accounts will be deleted. Check Achronos' post at Bungie.net for the details.

Editor's note: this probably means that Bungie is a step closer to revealing what they've been working on for the new Bungie.net.

Halo Phenom, a site that apparently started up only in February, is now closing in April. We mentioned them once when they put up an article on online cheating. Thanks Strithe who let us know.

Well, since Bungie started the Weekly Updates again for the upcoming release of Halo 2, there's been an increase in traffic to a lot of Halo sites, and Rampancy is no exception. In particular, a lot of people found Rampancy's Movies page, which while not nearly the complete listing they have at HBO, or the huge downspout of bandwidth that they have at Mythica, had a few good movies and was able to push a bit of traffic.

[image:7244 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Well, after nearly five years in existence, most of the last 2 with only myself at the helm, Rampancy is finding it impossible to keep up with Louis Wu at HBO. As said in one HBO forum thread, inspired by Rams' column over at BGH points out, there's really no point in having any Halo fansites besides HBO anyway.

Yet another Halo fansite has been hard hit by the voracious appetite that Halo fans have for movies. Halo GT has taken down the old movies they had in order to conserve bandwidth, and are inviting those who can help with hosting to contact them.