We wish everyone a Happy New Year 2020! :fireworks:

2019 bye bye

There is not much to mention from UGX-Mods in 2019.
Improvements were made to the site, but we were pretty much silent.

The anticipated goal of the UGX Launcher release was also not possible

Upcoming changes

There will be soon an announcement about major changes to UGX-Mods.
We are preparing the final steps and we assume mixed reactions, but we want to continue UGX and need your help.

This means changes to some systems, new monetization options and hopefully some new project releases (or announcements).

 

Activity

We are getting small boosts of activity, thanks to some fine modders who keep pushing the limits in CoD modding.

Thank You

Thanks to all who sticked with us in 2019. We appreciate your support and community love.
Let's continue in 2020 and bring back the good old times


UGX-Mods Team

Helloooo,


We celebrate yet another christmas. :christmas_tree: :santa:

Like each year, play some awesome christmas / winter themed zombie maps and slay some undead. :zombie:
We hope you all have a great time and wish you some great winter holidays with the ones that matter to you most.

UGX-Mods Team

This topic is for testing the text editor (CKEditor).

Please let me know about any issues you have.
How to report an issue:

• Create a new topic (= issue) here: https://www.ugx-mods.com/forum/ugx-mods-forum/98/
• Write in #ugx-site-feedback room of our UGX-Mods on Discord (or a personal message)
• Write a message in here with @Delta <issue description in here>

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE give me some information / screenshots / etc so that I don't need to waste hours hunting the issue.

 

We wish everyone a Happy New Year 2019! :fireworks:

2018 was great!

Although the UGX-Mods team (the few remaining ppl) stepped back from zombie modding,
we still love to see so much user generated content and activity in the modding scene.
Outstanding tools, amaizing maps,helpful tutorials and Q&A across the web - you guys rock!

The new UGX-Mods site overhaul is finally released and we hope we can grow bigger in 2019 with more cool features and improvements. :thumbsup:

UGX Launcher

Our anticipated goal to release the UGX Launcher  in 2018 was not possible due to personal events and of course the work on our site overhaul, but we are very optimistic that 2019 will be a great year with the release of the UGX Launcher which will finally replace the UGX MapManager and allows us to support and maintain the application as long as people are actively using it.

Activity

Over the past two years we noticed less activity and this year we try to find solutions to bring back the good old times. If you have a great idea or want to help us -> let us know!
On the other side: we are close to 500k registered members (crazy!) and we will hit it this year for sure.

Thank You

A big thank you goes to our site and chat moderators - we wouldn't be here without them!
Of course also a big shoutout to our V.I.P's (former UGX-Mods members / partners / etc.), our lovely Donators and of course every single user who are with us and keep this community alive. Thank you :heart:


2018 was great but 2019 will be even better!


UGX-Mods Team

Hello beloved members,

It's this magical time of the year again. :christmas_tree:
So many sales and your pockets are empty already. :money_with_wings:
Play some christmas / winter maps and fight against the undead!

We hope you all have a great time, many presents, good food and a lot of fun.

Have some great winter holidays with the ones that matter to you most :heart_decoration:


UGX-Mods Team

Current State:
Most of the issues have been resolved by now. We will monitor the situation and will do further improvements and optimizations if needed. :dolphin:

---

The Forum / Site has some critical issues atm.The most dramatic one is the 502 error thrown by Cloudflare due to most likely our server.I assume it's performance related and my hopes are to find a solution during the weekend.


If you encounter issues a simple reload should most likely fix it. - I know: not perfect - but thats what you get when a single developer is responsible for everything and only a small testing group checked the beta site out. 

---

Hey guys,

after over two years it's finally here, our site overhaul.
It was a long and stressfull journy and we are happy to finally share this project with everyone.

Please forgive us if there are some issues in the next few days, we will monitor the site and might hotfix issues which we simply couldn't find in our Closed, Donor & Open Beta

Most noteworthy changes compared to our old site:

You can read the latest changelog (and all others from the paste) here: https://confluence.ugx-mods.com/display/UGXMODS/UGXSMF+v0.8.0-beta

Thanks for your support, be sure to let us know what you think!



I'm personally happy that this milestone has been completed now.

UGX-Mods should be future proof now, bringing you a lot of new improvements and features + modern web standards.



Greetings on behalf of the remaining UGX-Mods team

Alex 'Delta' Diller

We have some great news to share, so let's get started!

Release date

We are very excited to announce the release date for the new UGX-Mods theme.

The upcoming weekend (September 8th - 9th) will be the beta release on our production site.
After over 2 years of planning, developing, testing and refineing it's finally happening.

Downtime / Maintenance

There will be a downtime of 1-2 hours !
During that time we will migrate everything on production.

We will announce the exact time on our UGX-Mods Discord and on Twitter (@UGXMods).

Last Open Beta version has been released

We also released the last open beta release on https://beta.ugx-mods.com - go check it out now! Everyone can take a look before it goes on production this weekend 

In this release we added new emotes like this one: 
We also added support for emojis: :heart_eyes: :laughing: :thumbsup: (you can only see them on https://beta.ugx-mods.com/forum - this will obviously change with the go-live)

We made more changes, improvements and features, read the full changelog here: https://confluence.ugx-mods.com/display/UGXMODS/UGXSMF+v0.7.2-open-beta


Thats it for now, stay frosty!

Hello community,

Today is an exciting day for us. We have finally released our new UGX-Mods Forum as Open Beta to everyone.

Simply head over to https://beta.ugx-mods.com to get started - be sure to give us feedback (see below) so that we can improve it before it goes live on our main domain (production).

Please note: Your user settings won't be carried over, so beta and non beta (production) won't share the same settings.
This also effects some forum settings and statistics like total forum user count and such.

Other than that, Beta and Production share the same data and you are free to use Beta as long the Open Beta goes.

You can also share beta links, once we move out we simply redirect the links to the correct site

Before we dive into the major changes, let's talk about you and your privacy first!

GDPR | Your privacy

You probably received dozens of emails about Privacy Policy changes and such. Well we updated our as well!
We refined it and made it more transparent. We also respect the EU GDPR and apply the changes and features to everyone including non EU citizens.
We face one big issue: Currently only https://beta.ugx-mods.com has these changes!
We try to get out of the Open Beta as fast as possible but we believe it will take up to two weeks before we can do that.
If you have any GDPR related concerns, simply use https://beta.ugx-mods.com which has all changes to comply with GDPR already.
We most likey will refine our Privacy Policy further and require your consent soon again - we are no experts

Major changes in Open Beta

The work began 2 long years ago and we added and improved a lot since then. Here some major highlights but there is a lot more:

• New HTML5 theme which is responsive and mobile ready (now you can browse on your phone without issues!)
• New HTML Text Edtior (CKEditor) for creating and editing your topics and replies.
  • New gallery and slider options for images
  • Easy media emebed with iframely, simply paste a link into the editor and magic happens
  • Autocomplete for emotes and widgets (try to type in : ) or #UGX and see what happens)
• Improved registration process for new users
  • Better client side validation (in general this effects many areas)
  • Email validation (no more typos and support requests)
  • Email registration check → we let you know about your status of your email
• Beautiful HTML emails with nice links 
• Connect and authenticate with your social accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, Steam, etc.
  • Discord connection with our UGX Discord. Link your account and sync your forum groups with your Discord Account
    (you'll also receive the UGX Member role in Discord)
• New Avatars and Usercard functionality
  • shows online state of user (green or red for online / offline) - in the future we want to extend this with the UGX Launcher.
  • click on any avatar to show the Usercard, to get more information about an user.
  • more avatar visibility! Yup we added support for your avatar to be displayed in many new places on the site.
• Forum Index improvements
  • Child Boards can be viewed and entered directly from the index
• Message index improvements
  • Preview of posts without navigating to the post (first and last message are shown)
• Personal Messages improvements (mostly design)
• Adding our very own blog which UGX-Mods doesn't use yet due to not enough time atm
• User Interface improvements
  • new modern blue look
  • Custom dropdowns, checkboxes and radioboxes
  • better error, info, warning display
• Offline mode & better caching
  • smaller total load helps to reduce bandwidth
  • in case you go offline the site shows a nicer offline site (great for mobile devices on the go)
• Alerts
  • receive alerts & desktop notifications for subscribed boards / topics and other actions
  • The sound and the desktop notification can be disabled in your settings!
• SEO improvements
  • link any ugx-mods.com url in Discord and such to show a nice preview. Forum posts actually show the first image if available
  • nicer URLs (with page title, etc.)
  • (lot of internal work has been made)
• New landing page available under https://beta.ugx-mods.com which will unite all our sites and with information about UGX-Mods.
• UGX Roadmap at https://beta.ugx-mods.com/roadmap
• GDPR improvements
  • privacy settings
  • export personal data

If you are interested in all changes, read all changelogs here or on our website in the changelog sidebar (footer and header).
We are waiting for your feedback / issue reports now, simply checkout the ugx-beta-feedback room on Discord or on our Forum https://beta.ugx-mods.com/forum/ugx-mods-beta-forum/98 and let us know about your issues or feature / improvements requests.

You can also write here directly on this announcement.

We evaluate your feedback and put it into our development roadmap. Hopefully you are excited with the new forum and everything works out smoothly.
That would mean that production would be soon ready for the new forum theme.

It has been a long journey for me (Delta) and I'm personally very excited to share with everyone my work

NOTE: the new html emails might also be sent out (rarely) to non-beta users!NOTE2: we changed the sender email from [email protected] to [email protected] for the new emails.We will deprecate noreply soon or later, so be sure to update your email rules & filters and include [email protected] to your contacts list, to ensure you get them without any issues!

HTML Emails?!

After weeks of work, a new update on https://beta.ugx-mods.com/forum is out for all donators.We are getting closer to the Open Beta!
The biggest update are our emails which we sent out daily to you.We now have shiny new HTML based emails. Not all emails will be sent out yet due to production vs beta state - but you'll progressivly notice the new emails and once we go Open Beta and beyoned, you'll get used to them

This is a major change - feedback as usual much apprecaited. If you notice something is totally odd, let us know!

A complete list of changes is here: https://confluence.ugx-mods.com/display/UGXMODS/UGXSMF+v0.6.0-donor-beta


Thanks and enjoy your weekend

We had an issue with mail sending for around 18 hours, all registration emails should have been resent.
If not, simply contact us or request the registration email here: https://www.ugx-mods.com/forum/activate/
 

New Server - Okay?! - So what exactly does that mean now?

We have now twice as much bandwidth which means a total of 500 Mbps.
Our server is also faster (better CPU) but thats not relevant to you.

In the end, the new server means faster downloads & better page loading times.


We also divided our sever into production and development.

Before our new server, our development tools (Jira, Confluence, ...) and our production websites (UGX-Mods Forum, ...) where hosted on the same server.
Now the forum and upcoming services will run on their own server, this ensures less performance impact when we do some busy dev stuff

We can ensure more redundant backups. We have in total three server now, so each (critical) backup is synced to two servers now.

The new server offered us a new fresh start.

I'm a hobbyist server administrator.
That means I didn't received any porfessional schooling or anything like that.
It's all based on carefull internet resarch, learning by doing and my technical interest in these things.

For UGX I do this now for over 5 years and a fresh start offered me to revisit best practice.
That helped us to migrate easily to a new database engine, a newer PHP version and also improved web server configuration.

The result is a faster and more secure system than before.

Speaking of security

SSL/TLS

We recently moved our site to enforced full TLS encryption.
With the server move, we also send now an so called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) Header.
We configured it that way, that your browser will remember the website as HTTPS only and will only make HTTPS connections now.
If our certificate is wrong or anything like that, the browser will block the access to the site / request.
(it's a really easy explenation - but the message is here that we enhanced the security )

We are applying to the preload list now, so browser vendors (like Chrome and Firefox) will hardcode our domain in their list.

Meltdown & Spectre

You might have heard about Meltdown and Spectre recently, especially with Intel CPU.All our servers use Intel Xenons (Server CPUs) and yes - they are all effected by this.

The good news first: Our systems are patched against Meltdown (case 1).

But apparently we are not secured against Spectre (case 2 & case 3) yet.
We are awaiting patches by the devs and as soon as they are out we will update our systems.

It might impact performance but based on our current state it won't be noticable (at least for you ).

Fruther improvements this year

We will monitor and further improve / tweak the server. This is an ongoing (time consuming) process.
On my todo list is more monitorng, better security audits,

Whats next?

The server migration is over and I can slowly go back to web development.
A new major patch is almost ready for the Closed Beta and we hope that the Open Beta can happen soon.
Maybe February?

Thank you sooo much

I would like to thank foremost our donators and supporters, every individual who contributes to this website and / or community.
Thanks to you, I can do this fun, great and amaizing hobby and while I had some sleepless and stressfull nights (especially the past few days) it's still filling me with joy and a good feeling that we serve for over 6 years now this amaizing forum for amaizing people (like you!).

Also please take part on our survey if you haven't yet.
It's a great motivation boost (I read every single one of them) and insight into what you guys think and want from UGX-Mods.

Simply visit the following google form and get started: https://goo.gl/forms/VrkUgNmihgCDuwXl2
(duration: under 10 minutes)
The survey will end mid February.

Stay Frosty.

Upcoming Server Maintenance on 20th January 2018 at 11 pm UTC (https://time.is/de/UTC)

Expected downtime of the forum: under 1 hour
Please note that it might come to further issues after the maintenance, so please forgive us if the first 24 hours might be a bit slower or if there are errors.

We will update the status on Discord, Twitter and at https://status.ugx-mods.com/ following by an new announcement (with more information) once we are confident that the new server is fully running.

Jira and Confluence (our wiki) won't be affected by this.

Thats it so far

Hello members,

in order to improve your experience on UGX-Mods, we need to ask you some questions which will help us with decision making, prioritize tasks and to know our userbase better.

Simply visit the following google form and get started: https://goo.gl/forms/VrkUgNmihgCDuwXl2
(duration: under 10 minutes)
The survey will end mid February.

If you ever wanted to express your feedback, now is the time!

Thanks to all participants, we appreciate your spend time.

Also: We will upgrade our web server this month for sure, starting soon with the initial setup.

What does that mean for you?

• Faster downloads
• Faster page loading times

There will be a small downtime of the UGX-Mods Forum (~1 hour) which we will announce early with more information regarding the upgrade.

Thats it - have a great weekend!

Welcome in 2018!

We hope you all had a great start into the new year.

The new year is here and it's going to be a good year for sure!Year 2018 will be the year which is going to revamp UGX-Mods.

We start with our new homepage, which is going into Open Beta at the end of Q1 2018.
Everyone is then invited to check out what we have been working on for almost two years now. °O°

After that we want to release the major Update of the UGX Launcher to donors first, following with an Open Beta in Q3 2018.
Besides those two major releases / updates from UGX-Mods, we hope to see a lot of user generated content for WaW, BO1 and BO3.

We are excited and hope you are excited too =)


2018 is going to be great!

Hello beloved members,

It's this time of the year again. - The sales are there and your pockets are empty already.


We hope you all have a great time, many presents, good food and a lot of fun.


Merry Christmas

UGX-Team

Hey guys,

we updated (long overdue!) the forum software and force everyone to use SSL/TLS now.
(so you'll access the page now via https from now on - don't worry - nothing will change for you)

This was quite major step, so there might be some issues. Be so kind and report them to us, so that I can fix it asap.

Note: you might not get the full green lock yet, I'll work on this.
Update (16 DEC 2017): The green SSL Lock should be visible now across the entire site. (There might be still some forum posts with a yellow warning due to user content which is still http content)
Note 2: https://beta.ugx-mods.com received an update as well: https://confluence.ugx-mods.com/display/UGXMODS/UGXSMF+v0.5.3-donor-beta


So whats next?!

• We will move to a new server this - or early next year - which will improve general performance and download / page load speed
• We are going to further update the https://beta.ugx-mods.com and start the OPEN BETA soon

On behalf of the UGX-Mods Team

Alex 'Delta' Diller