Welcome to the new TMN.

Many of you have asked me what has been going on with TMN the last couple of months. Allow me to quickly explain:

Around the end of September, the company that hosts The Magic Network was hacked. It was not a direct attack on TMN, it was an attack on TMN's webhosting company's servers. Unfortunately, TMN was affected by the hack and many of you were faced with a message saying that TMN was hacked when you tried to access the site.

The webhosting company made their best efforts to restore the site, but unfortunately some things got messed up in the process. I also did my best to bring it back to normal, but it still remained fairly unstable.

As a result, many of you noticed some bugs, and the site went down several times in October.

Finally, with so much instability, I decided a complete overhaul was necessary. So I went to a backup of the site I had from before the hack, and started restoring from there. In the process, I overhauled the design and a lot of the background infrastructure of the site, bringing it more up to date, and setting the ground work for better scalability into the future.

I have made the site simpler and more integrated, and also addressed some community feedback in the process.

Some of the highlights include:

• Better styling, easier to read, "friendlier" look (but still with an edge)
• Simplified the menu into TMN's main pillars: The Community, The Forum, The Reviews, The Marketplace, The Blog, and Video Chat (via tinychat)
• Ability to change your forum signature (under the "Community" menu, go to the "Forum" sub-menu, and then go to the "Profile" tab)
• Everyone can comment on everyone's status
• Videos are now integrated into the community timeline
• Removed the points system (I am still rethinking how points will work in the future, but for now, I have removed them)

Also, you should now be able to see both Android and iPhone optimized versions of the site - although I have not fully tested them yet.

I hope you enjoy the new TMN. Keep on the lookout for some upcoming promotions to help spread the word.

Also, during the restoration of the site, I may have lost some things that happened in October (status updates, private messages, etc). My apologies for that... I was not able to recover everything, and did my best to recover what I could.

Also, you will notice that the videos do not have thumbnails. I was not able to migrate the video thumbnails over. If you want your videos to have a thumbnail, please upload them again and delete the version that does not have a thumbnail.

I hope you enjoy the new TMN, contribute, and come back often.

Cheers,

V.