The Past

As you may have noticed, TIMGUL has reached 13000 posts now. This may not seem like much compared to some other forums, but this is a great period of time in TIMGUL history, as it marks the end of an endless struggle that prevented the site from getting past the 12000 posts mark, despite posts being made regularly.

Two and half a year ago, the site was hit by typical internet community disputes during an entire year, in addition to suffering from a database crash that brought the site down during three month and causing a three months database rollback, all of which caused the loss of over 5000 posts and 1000 song attachments over time.

One year afterward, everything returned back to normal, thanks to the help of our administrators that kept the site afloat over time. However, the site needed time to recover, so Early 2010 was marked by two periods of slow forum posting activity, where the site started to be invaded by spambots.


The Present

Over the time, TIMGUL rebuilt a new userbase of MTVMG enthusiasts, and now the site activity, despite not being as high as in 2008, is enjoying a slow increase and several new songs are being posted. This is very good, considering that several Internet forums normally never recover from a long period of inactivity.


The Future

Now come the future. As you remember months ago, we upgraded once again to SMF 2.0. However, we would like to eventually give TIMGUL a customized look, once and for all (in other word, stopping using pre-made forum themes such as the default one), which is something that SMF 2.0 is making extremly hard on us. In addition to that, I find the SMF 2.0 admin panel very hard to navigate compared to SMF 1.1.x, and the extra features offered there are not signifiant enough.

What this means is that TIMGUL will be downgraded from SMF 1.1.14. The Bookmarks feature and custom profile field features will be removed completely, although a different custom profile field feature will eventually return.

Here's a preview of the forum theme that would be used after the downgrade, although the O icons would be replaced with the Music 2000/MTVMG memory card icon (M2):



Also here comes the hosting issue. I would like to eventually get rid of my 1and1 account to only keep my AspiratioHosting one. Recently I cleaned TIMGUL webspace from broken files and unused data, in order to cut the site size from 8 gigabytes to 4. This included moving some videos over Youtube, for example. This would finally allow me to host TIMGUL on the same webspace as Omnimaga website and still have almost 7 GB of diskspace left, three of which would be assigned to TIMGUL song attachments. The only downside is that the maximum attachment file sizes for future uploads would return to 6 MB per file instead of the current 16 MB, which, however, should no longer be a problem, as several websites allowing playing music automatically without having to wait for a download link are now available, including some popular ones used by our members (SounCloud, for example), and Youtube now offers pretty good sound quality.

The major good side if TIMGUL website is moved to my other webspace is that even after downgrading to SMF 1.1.14, it would run faster than where it is now, and it would finally have an extra anti-spambot software to reduce the task of admins.


Possible merge of TIMGUL with Omnimaga

Because Omnimaga website, which I also founded, also includes a music discussion and showcase section, I have considered the possibility of merging both TIMGUL and Omnimaga together. Basically, TIMGUL would replace the Omnimaga music section, although the entire TIMGUL content would pretty much remain intact, even the site portal and the forum theme (when Omnimaga users would open the TIMGUL section, the forum theme would switch to TIMGUL's). It may even be possible to have every mtv-music-generator.com URLs redirect automatically the respective relocated posts. This would allow TIMGUL to gain extra traffic from the userbase there (1000 members), although such website merge is ambitious, as this requires a lot of work in the database. Don't expect such merge to happen very soon if it has to, since it will require some testing prior that.

The only data loss that may result from a site merge are PMs (private messages).

In any case, regardless of if the site merge happens or not, when the downgrade to SMF 1.1.14 and site hosting move happens, cookies settings may be lost, so you may need to login again once if you set your account to login automatically on each visit. This SMF 2.0 copy of TIMGUL would remain online in read-only mode for at least a year, for those who wish to retrive custom profile field and bookmarks that they lost, and if the site merge happens, their private messages. If the site merge occurs and it is possible to setup the MTVMG URL to automatically redirect to appropriate posts and content, you may not even notice that the merge happened, aside from the URL changing to Omni in your address bar and the sudden post count increase from 13K to over 176K.

Don't worry, when the site moves, a lot of backups will be made, in case. We certainly won't take any chance (like the failed 2009 SMF 2.0 upgrade attempt), lol.

I would like to thank everyone who allowed TIMGUL to stay active and for keeping it a friendly environment, and let's hope for a great long-term future.

Hi, as some of you might have read in one of my recent post, I planned to downgrade this forum from SMF 2.0 series to SMF 1.1.14 and there are some small possibilities that eventually both Omnimaga and TIMGUL websites will share the same member accounts.

However, current versions of the Bookmark MOD no longer appear to work properly under SMF 1.1.14. Upon installing, a blank page appears. Unfortunately, I do not like SMF 2.0 admin panel. The navigation is very confusing (eg: often I'll click the forum link there, expecting to go back to the forums, only to be redirected to an admin option), making custom themes for SMF 2.0 is a freaking nightmare and it's not like it has many more features than SMF 1.1.x had.

So I was wondering if anyone would mind losing their bookmarked topics at http://www.mtv-music-generator.com/index.php?action=bookmarks in the near future? Because after we downgrade, this feature would be removed completely (although a copy of this version of TIMGUL, in read-only mode, would remain available for a while so people can back up their bookmarks)

Another thing is that after the move, you will be logged out once so you'll need to login again.

Here is my newest song: La Porte du Soleil. This song is special in some ways: I got the idea in my head back in Early 2001, when I was drawing a comic-based dice-pen RPG of the same name as the song. I imagined what could be the theme song if that D&D-style game comic ever made it into a video game format. However, back then I did not have any software to compose music, and with the years I forgot about the song. In 2011, I started having memories of the idea again, after checking back my old comic books again, and eventually decided to make the song. The difference, however, is that now it's kinda like power metal rather than my original '80s style idea. However, the entire melody until the keyboard solo starts has been in my head for a decade.

In summary, here is a new song from me, that stayed in my head for over a decade before finally making it to a music software.

The style might remind you of Quest for the Legendary Axe, which was used for the Axe Tribute video. The title "La Porte du Soleil" means The Gate of the Sun in English. I kept the name in French because the original story it was gonna be used as intro for was a French game.

A song I started in Early 2009, which went on hiatus for one year, then got half-finished, then went once again on hiatus until 2011.

It's a simple song with eurodance elements. This one was made using the crappy MTV Music Generator 3: This Is the Remix software (I prefer MTVMG1/2000 by far x.x).

I included a 128 and 320k version.

Hello.

In response to the recent wave of spammers registering on the forums, we have setup an host name and IP black list from which it is no longer possible to register. Also, due to almost all new member accounts with no posts being spam accounts (coming either from the new blacklisted hosts or having signature advertisments), we have decided to delete all member accounts with no post. From now on, every month all zero-post members that signed up at least 30 days ago will be deleted.

Since member and admin activation is unreliable (activation e-mails not being sent all the time and bots still getting through), we won't go with these measures, although we might eventually try to install another anti-spam, assuming we can find one that works on this hosting provider.

Sorry for the inconveniences this might cause.

Return From The Forbidden Lands

A japaneese-style UK hardcore song that I started in late 2009 after finishing the 2009 remix of Unknown Truth from the Forbidden Lands. I stopped working on it for over 1 year and now I just did some final retouches as I didn't plan to make it any longer (this was not meant to be a long song due to the style).

(Attached MP3s below, because I closed my music dl section from guests on the other site and I had a 320K version to upload)

As you remember, I recently talked about the possibility that TIMGUL and Omnimaga websites move to a different hosting provider. Finally, I have learned some things about hosting providers that made me change my plans a little bit. Let me explain:

Those companies like 1and1 (the hosting provider TIMGUL used since its opening), Hostgator, Yahoo, Surpasshosting and Dreamhost that offers extremly high storage capacity and bandwidth (sometimes, even unlimited everything) for like $4-5 a month are known to the hosting world as "oversellers". 1and1 gave us 120 GB of diskspace and 1200 GB of bandwidth for $4.95 a month with two free domain names. However, there is a catch: they do not really give us this much bandwidth. Those hosting providers promise their customers with almost unlimited features to lure them, but if all those customers were to use this much space at once, they would go bankrupt. They simply lure customers this way because they know they are low budget people who will not even need this much diskspace. As a result, they host about 1000 websites per server. If many of those sites get busy at once, the server cannot handle the load and throw us a nice 500 Internal Server Error, forcing us to wait a few seconds and try again. Now what if one site in particular used way too much ressources compared to the others? Well... those hosts usually have one-sided contracts allowing them to disable parts of your site that take too much load or even terminate your account! I did not know that when I bought this hosting plan, but even if I knew, I did not expect TIMGUL and Omnimaga to ever get busy to that point. However, Omnimaga eventually went close and I was suggested to look for a more high-end hosting provider if I was planning to use more ressources in the future. However, a high-end hosting plan that would offer enough bandwidth and diskspace for TIMGUL would cost too much money and in our case it would be a dedicated server or a high-end VPS, which requires very good computer knowledge, something I am still not very good at.

So here is what happened:

-Omnimaga has been moved alone to a high-end shared hosting plan, which provides enough bandwidth per month for the website alone in long terms. It also provides more than enough diskspace for it (the site is 2.75 GB large).
-Initially, my plan was to merge TIMGUL with Omnimaga, integrating all TIMGUL posts, song, attachments and members in the other forum, but TIMGUL is simply too large (about 10 GB in size) to survive on the new host in long term. Also, Omnimaga, due to its nature, cannot be upgraded to SMF 2.0 in short terms. However, TIMGUL doesn't generate as much traffic as Omnimaga, even with music downloads, so as a result, it will remain on 1and1 with no danger of getting shut down due to server load abuse.

So basically, both sites are now hosted on separate providers, each of them suiting both site needs accordingly (1and1 is better for diskspace, but not for bandwidth usage). With TIMGUL alone on a large capacity host, this allowed me to remove the 10 GB attachment cap on music attachments, so when the attachment folder will hit 10 GB, you will not get an error and will not need to delete old files. Hopefully, the migration of the other site elsewhere might improve TIMGUL performance as well.

We have upgraded to MySQL 5.0 and SMF 2.0 RC3, which fixed a few of the forum errors. This version of 2.0 is much more stable than the one we tried one year ago, but I took a backup before upgrading, in case.

Unfortunately I could not find a SMF 2.0 rendition of the SMF 1.1.11 theme so the site looks very different now. However, I might be able to reinstall some new themes at one point, when I get more free time.

Also some forum members had posts that were not assigned to their account. This was fixed.

You probably noticed that TIMGUL website has suffered more downtimes recently, especially during afternoon and sometimes during night (Eastern Time), throwing you intermittent "500 Internal Server Error" messages that usually goes away after a second, but happens every few page load, hindering posters. Well, not only this is happening, but 1and1 hosting provider also started reducing the quality of their PHP support on their shared servers, causing one of our anti-spam to stop working, making the registration process extremly slow due to the website not being able to connect to the Stop Forum Spam database anymore. In addition to that, the other forum hosted on this package has a database of about 40 MB, which is only 60 MB below the 1and1 DB cap of 100 MB per MySQL databases.

My guess about the downtimes and PHP features disabling is that either 1and1 services are getting lower and lower in quality, or the other site is simply too demanding for the hosting plan anymore. In other words, there are chances that we may be switching to Surpasshosting soon. This also means that in the meantime, both sites will have to deal with spambots again.

During October, there may be some periods of downtimes that will last several hours, should we switch hosting then. The duration of the downtimes would depend of how well and successful the hosting move occurs.

Thank you for understanding.

This track was going to be used in the RPG Maker game I was working on back in 2009 called Super Star Hero. The song is called Frozen Danger. It was planned for use in a snowy part of the game, but then the project was discontinued. The song style is similar to console, as well as some music from french openings of japaneese TV series from the '80s like (Sentai series), (Goldorak in France) and .

You lost the game.

For those who are confused, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

Wow I haven't posted new songs in a long while here. However, I didn't really do much music lately anyway. My last finished songs were Magic Hardcore and Eurobeatizer and it was in 2009. However, now I decided to give music making a go again and this time I went for a different style than dance/rave: power metal.

This is the first time I ever successfully do such song because it is very hard in MTVMG to get the guitar riffs to sound right. However, I think it worked out pretty well this time and as with my song Super Star Hero, I added a video game/japaneese touch to the song and a keyboard style solo like Rhapsody of Fire and Stratovarius music. The song is inspired a lot from SSH music, as well as video game music such as Final Fantasy 6/7 battle themes and the Ys series on the Turbografx 16.

The song title is "Quest For The Legendary Axe". It was made using Music 2000 (MTV Music Generator) for the Playstation 1. All riffs created myself, but used only the program samples.

You can download it at one of the two following URLs:

128 kbps: http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=downloads;sa=downfile&id=529

320 kbps: http://xlib.mtv-music-generator.com/DJ%20Omnimaga%20-%20Quest%20For%20The%20Legendary%20Axe%20320k.mp3

As you know, I am the person in charge of keeping TIMGUL hosted online (and paying for it). I have been doing so since October 2007. By 2008, TIMGUL shared the same webspace as Omnimaga website, another community I run. However, from November 2009 to January 2010, I started to face some harsh realities that made me realize that I would soon have to pass the torch to someone else, and because this hosting package is primarly used by Omnimaga now, it was inevitable that someone from Omnimaga would eventually take over. At the end of January, discussion between staff and certain #omnimaga ops occured regarding the future of Omnimaga/TIMGUL hosting, involving the eventual transfer of the 1and1 package ownership to one of the staff/op or multiple ones. This finally happened tonight and Rcfreak0, who is primarly active on the IRC channel of that site and partially in charge of maintaining it, was chosen as the new person in charge of the hosting bill, starting after October 2010 (altough payments are now officially made by him, I have assumed the costs for the next two 6-months bills and the next domain name renewal by sending him the money in advance). This is not really a money issue, but more of a long-term Omnimaga/TIMGUL future one, in terms of online avaliability. Altough a few other people including myself still has full access to both the 1and1 panel and the FTP, rcfreak0 will now be the person keeping Omnimaga/TIMGUL avaliable online in long term. DJ Droppin, Fear 2 Stop, Not A Number and The Lyricist will remain in charge of TIMGUL management and I will remain in charge of the maintenance/backup portion of the site.

This hosting ownership change will have no impact on TIMGUL and Omnimaga itself, and will ensure better stability in long terms in terms of hosting.

The hosting package where is located TIMGUL and Omnimaga also hosts another website, an image folder and a file space folder, and may eventually host another site as well.

Ok, so I am not really back, but recently my other site has been hit by a massive wave of spambots. Altough still 12 times smaller than our Invisionfree board in 2007 (and TIMGUL back when it still used InvisionBoard 1.3 in 2007-early 2008), 3 spambots registrations a day is still a lot considering all anti-spams we have. Then I thought about TIMGUL and remember Rob telling me about a lot of new registrations here. So I checked, and there were a lot of spambots registrations. So I installed an anti-spam that should hopefully block 90% of them. I also filtered these bad accounts. There was even a member who signed up 10 times under an e-mail like BathurstEmma@gmail.com or something like that, with dots in the address, so if you noticed the membercount seems to have decreased this much, this is why.

Also, *static.theplanet.com was banned as a whole, because of a recent invasion from there. Spambots appears to use this hosting provider as a shell, proxy or VHost to do their thing.

I also deleted the entire Trash Bin forum that only staff could see, because it gave 500 Internal Server Errors and was impossible to access, so this is why the forum post count went down by almost 5000. Now I recreated a new Trash bin.

This should help preventing some problems because anyone could click the spambot links and get hacked or infected by bad files they contain, or fall for phishing scams. This should also help preventing my host from shutting down my account if they ever noticed our database was filled with these links.

I will also probably scan through forum files and update some mods, in case they are outdated.

http://www.savefile.com/files/925986