Welcome to the relaunched website.
Over the past few months a team of volunteers from the games industry, academia and related areas have been working in their spare time to bring this day about.
We have had a makeover which has added a number of improvements, including audiovisual and social media capabilities. We are updating our educational courses section and we have ported over our features and other resources. We have also been looking at the survey and yes we have tried to improve the user interface experience and make it easier for people to submit content and to post on the forums.
Why do it?
We had a bit of soul searching as well. Should we do it? Is it needed?
We decided that this site provided a place to bring all the activities and information on the Irish games industry and game related activities into one place. We felt that while there are other spaces where people can communicate and meet but this site provides something different.
This site is open to all. Anyone can join and post on our forums and come to our events. We will post jobs and positions for small companies and projects based on the island of Ireland for free. It is not a closed group and we do not charge a membership fee.
We see this site as a hub in a dispersed network. It aims to keep people who are now abroad in touch with people at home. It provides a space for indies, freelancers, students and academics to share information and publicise their projects. We provide summary reports on relevant research and information on games that have been released. We commission people to do longer features on major developments.
Of course, as volunteers we can only do that if you, the users, provide us with the content. There is no team of journalists – if there is going to be content on the site we are all going to have to provide it.
So what now?
We have upgraded to WordPress and added a new forum. All existing users of our forums will receive a password reset email, as well as a newsletter. We are aware that lots of people have changed email addresses. If you are locked out, please click here to get account recovery assistance.
We now have a strong security setup, and some members have volunteered to run a security audit. The old site experienced a hack during the summer involving an SQL Mass Injection. The site was originally developed back in 2003 and with minor updates it was not strong enough to withstand current hackers. The new site means that we are up to date with the latest security protocols.
We want to showcase the local industry. So if you have news, images, and links to youtube videos, please send them through the Submit Stories section of the site.
This is still a work in progress. We are not finished. Help us out by filling in our short survey at http://jamiegdie.polldaddy.com/s/gamedevelopers-ie-2014-overhaul-survey
Finally, there is a huge amount of work still to be done to tag our database of 2000 articles. Several of you have flagged through the survey you’re interested in helping, and we’ll follow up with you shortly. If you are interested in giving a few hours to help, please contact aphra@gamedevelopers.ie
Thanks to all our volunteers who have helped with the site redesign and supported us for the past twelve years.
GameDevelopers.ie Site Statement 25th August 2014
Dear GameDevelopers.ie Users,
As you may have seen, on the 24th of July GameDevelopers.ie was down for several days. Following this several GameDevelopers.ie users begun to receive very targeted phishing emails trying to get login details for Bank of Ireland, including some sent to email accounts set up specifically for GameDevelopers.ie, and nothing else. We now believe that the site was hacked into (which broke the site) and potentially the entire database was compromised.
In line with current best practice we are taking down the current GameDevelopers.ie site with immediate effect. We only store usernames, skills profiles and the contents of private messages. Passwords were encrypted, and we have never stored any financial information.
However, if you used your username/email address and password associated with GameDevelopers.ie anywhere else we highly recommend that you change them.
Since April 2014 a team of volunteers has been working hard to redevelop the site and we are in the process of migrating the content and forums to brand new software. We had intended to launch the site in the next month or two and this is still our plan. Once we come back online with the new site you will receive an email and be asked to choose a new password.
If you can volunteer time to the GameDevelopers.ie V2 effort or want to follow our progress please follow/contact@AphraK. We are also seeking help from our more technical/hackery members to do a security audit and avoid this happening again.
We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused our members.
Sincerely,
The GameDevelopers.ie Volunteer Team