SWAT Portal

just work in progress

Crossfire 2.0 Freelancer Mod - SWAT Portal

I just want to announce that dented_ship and Ajay volunteered to help keeping this Portal save and clean. Thank you guys.

Both have joined our Moderator team.

Thank you also to all the other Moderators, Super-Moderators, news writers and contributers.

If you were wondering why the Portal was offline today... well, yeah... HDD number 4 died this night. It meanwhile got replaced and backups were put in place.

If the components keep dying at this pace, we will have a brand new server in less than 2 months.

Howdy!

Accolade complete: this webserver has killed its 3rd HDD

Thanks to the people that gave me a notice earlier today via email and moddb.

The damaged HDD meanwhile is replaced and backups seem to be working. It will take some time for the server to rebuild the cache for all the pages so it will be a bit slow in the next few hours.

If any chars got banned due to the failed CF updates I will unban tomorrow in the morning after the daily updates ran through.

Either on 16th or 17th May there will be a security update on the SWAT Server.

This means that the webside will be offline for about 10mins.

Also the connection to the Crossfire Server could be disturbed during that time.

Quote from Portal News

It appears we all forgot the SWAT Portal's Birthday, so let me be the first to say...

Happy Birthday to the SWAT Portal! A place where it isn't just an ordinary forum or website for a standard game, the SWAT Portal is a home to many. A place where players can come together and have fun with others, and rejoice their achievements and celebrations. So I say for all of us, Happy Birthday for the Home for all Crossfire (and extended games) Players!

And congrats to OP and others for creating such a home!

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I wish you a great Christmas time with your friends and families and of course a Happy New Year 2016.

Special thanks go to all little helperswhich supported us, helped to keep everything running and worked on the Crossfire Mod and our game sections.

Have a great time!

Hooray, we have a teenager!

13 years ago a dream was born, a dream about a Community full of great people and lots of fun.
Together we went through ups and downs, worked hard to create something impressive that people always will remember and enjoyed the fruits of this hard work.
This community evolved into something great and after 13 years we are in a situation where we have so many options that its hard to decide.
Whatever that future decisions will be, we keep moving forward, knowing that this is a place by the players for the players.

In the past years I often released impressive numbers about Portal visitors, mod downloads... etc.
I'll skip that today.
While these numbers are about the same as last year (slightly better) I consider them relative unimportant.
You cant measure joy in numbers.
People had the chance to discover all the new stuff in CF2.0 during the past year and also helped to make this mod even better.
People also were active on the forum.
This shows me that this is a

Twelve years ago this community went live.
Since that we have achieved much and today it is time to look back, remember great times but also look forward to new tasks, to a new and even better future.
The past year was incredible hard for us as developers and website staff members.
This place has changed alot over the past year and we have done an incredible amount of work to bring it to this state.

Not only that we have a shiny new Portal with awesome performance and awesome functionalities... no... we also have Crossfire 2.0 running on our server, reached the highest possible rank in our Star Trek Online Fleet and have been voted into the Top100 of the Mod Awards for the 8th time.
Thousands of working hours went both into the Portal and into the Mod.
The new year will bring further improvements and of course a great time for our members.

But today... we all should lean back and enjoy the day.... celebrate another great year in this community.

Over the past 3 weeks ive done dozens of updates on the SWAT Portal and its associated websites.
The updates reach from minor correction, security fixes, new features and some restructuring.

Most noticable today certainly is that our fellow bot ran amok.
I completely replaced it with a new better working version which had to catch up some work.
Its running smooth now and will support us here in a much better way than the old bot.

One of the big changes concerns mostly the players that are part of our STO Fleets. Here the member management has been completely recreated in order to do updates of the rank system on the fly and link everything directly with the SWAT community framework.
I'll explain the details to the STO fleets later.

A new and certainly very interesting feature for all out members might be our new "Competition" system which allows us to run multiple leages here at the Portal.
I think Freelancer Event Managers will find good use for such a feature.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, a cool time with your friends and families, a relaxed time in the following days and of course a Happy New Year.

I also want to thank all the people that supported us this year, all the donors, the people that helped other players, the many of you that have voted for Crossfire this year at the Mod Awards.
A special thanks goes to our Event Managers, the Portal Staff members which have supported me with this weeks Portal upgrade and all the Crossfire Development Team members which have done such an excellent job this year. Thank you all.

With the upgrade of the SWAT Portal (which btw. I still havent officialy announced *cough*) we have introduced more and more great features to our community.
One of them is a new translation function that you can find on all Portal pages.

You can find a small translation button if you scroll down to the bottom of the pages.
It detects your browser language and will translate the portal content into that language as long this button is active.

This will allow our members to understand whats been written by others even if it is in a different language and certainly will we will get rid of language barriers.

During a Kernel Update this night there was a malfunction of one of the HDDs on the SWAT Main webserver.

The HDD meanwhile got replaced and no data was lost

The few hours downtime has lead to market problems on the CF server which also should be fixed meanwhile (Freelancer restart is required).

Server statistics and player lists will update tomorrow.

Websites of the SWAT network should be a bit slower than usual at the moment as they require to do daily updates and maintenance now.

In a few hours everything should be normal again.

Like every year Id like to loose a few words about the year which is reaching its end today.

Well, it was a relative calm year when i look back. No major catastrophes, relative small troubles over the entire year. Thats good.

The community held together and helped each other and of course new players. Thank you for that.

2013 also was the year where Crossfire got its 7th Mod of the Year nomination which is certainly a milestone for us. No other Freelancer mod and I also believe no other mod in general managed to get to this point. Thank you for all your votes.

Speaking of Crossfire the year 2013 was also an incredible time and work intense year.

I think only Huor really knew how much I was trying to push the development of Crossfire 2.0 since May/June in order to reach a state where we can discuss about a "release" and he also has spent such an incredible amount of work on the mod that I just want to say thank you. Thank you also to the other people which helped... on the mod and on

.

On 14th December 2002 five members of a young Starlancer clan founded the SWAT Portal as they felt the need to create a community for players and clans that wish to stay connected even if they play different games.
11 years later we still have this idea in mind and can look back on many great years.
Thank you to everyone who supported us and helped to stay an active community for such a long time.

We have many great plans for the next year. Not only the Crossfire 2.0 release can be expected but also the start of new projects and massive updates here at the Portal.
I hope the community gives us the support to keep going for another 11 years.

Always keep in mind:

Quote from Portal News

Some of you may have noticed (maybe not) that Paypal is now charging a currency exchange fee on transactions, including donations to SWAT Portal. The fee was about 4% on the amount I transferred to OP this month (US dollars -> Euros); I don't know if the rate increases with the size of the transaction or remains constant. In any case, I recommend that anyone who is making donations to SWAT/Crossfire to take it upon themselves to absorb the currency exchange fee, and not expect OP to absorb the unnecessary loss of revenue to keep this great site & server open to all. This would mean that you increase your system rent payment from 20euro to 20.8 euro. This is really not a big sacrifice considering the value OP provides us all! Thanks for your cooperation, and we'll see you in space!

During the past weeks I've done massive updates to the SWAT Portal and sites which belong to it.

Our new Star Trek Online section which soon will hit 300 active players has got its Fleet website a few weeks ago at Phoenix Legion XII | The Star Trek Online Fleet of the SWAT Portal
While meanwhile complete and fully functional I can not exclude that further changes to the website will be done in the following weeks as I am currently discussing optional features with the game developers -> automatic member management and fleet statistics.

Since Bloodguard returned to active duty and I expect that this clans starts to play a bigger role again the BG Clan page got replaced with a new modern one.
Bloodguard

On the Portal itself more than 30 updates were done to fix bugs and improve the features.
Just to name a few changes:
- access problems to the ticketsystem should be fixed now
- members can apply for usergroups already when they register
- better protection against spam bot registrations
-

2012 was a very weird year.

The world did not end, eventhough mass effect 3 was a catastrophy.

Looking back at the year which is almost over I unfortunately have many negative impressions in mind... more negative than positive actually.

Community members which prefer to argue than to work together, the loss of a clan, conflicts between communities, players which complain about every shit instead of making use of what they got and not fulfilled objectives for the year.

Most of the above mentioned stuff had negative impact on the portal.

The lack of help and support aswell all the troubles generated by the players have thrown back the development of CF2.0 by many months. Even worse, it nearly killed the motivation of the team.

I remember 3 times when Huor requested help and got not even a reply.... and I know that people had the knowledge and ability to help. Probably its best if I dont mention how many times I requested help and got no reply during the past year.

It saddens me that

The SWAT Portal wishes you all a Merry Christmas, an always save space dock and a Happy New Year.