Intro

So a lot of you have been wondering why I haven’t posted anything since June of 2010 and want to know what happened to a bunch of the hosted sites.  Well a few things happened around that time.  First I changed jobs (I love my new job) but with that came more responsibility and therefore I could not spend really any time on this site.  The other thing is EdgeNetwork (the former owners of hlgaming.com) shut down their services.  I will be writing about both of these events here in a moment.

Job and Life Changes

So I changed jobs right around the time of my last post.  I know work for a great company that pays an actual fare wage.  During that time I also got addicted to Star Trek Online and a bit into Minecraft.  I ended up giving up Minecraft after 6 months as playing a game with really young people is no fun and downright annoying (thank god there was no voice chat).

Along with my primary job I also started to work heavily on launching MJCS Studios.  I created a few applications (one is one the Windows Phone Marketplace called “STO Profile Viewer” and the other is “Supreme Shortcuts” that allows you to customize your Windows phone).  This side business is starting to grow but slowly.

EdgeNetwork shuts down

So to my surprise Shawn from EdgeNetwork (the owner) decided to shut down all but one  of his sites (GTA Gaming) as the others just weren’t active or were not making any money (this was in mid-2010). Now if we rewind a bit to mid-2009 I had e-mailed Shawn about overhauling HLGaming.com.  He responded then that he was going to Shutdown HLGaming.com and all of the other sites and focus on GTA Gaming.  This ended up taking about a year to do so.

This is the e-mail I received from him:

I haven't gotten back to you because you've decided to do this resurrection at the worst of times, or maybe the best of times depending on perspective.

I'd already decided I was going to shutdown edgenetwork, have been going through and performing mass deletions on all the sites long dead as well as sites clearly abusing the lack of supervision.

Then this.

On the one hand, had it been a month later you decided to resurrect it, the entire site would've probably been deleted by then. On the other, I still don't want to consider responsibility of hlgaming anymore.

The basic plan was to strip the server of all hosted sites with exception to the only site that has continued to thrive for 6 years, gtagaming, and move it to a server of it's own, leaving behind all of the old edge backend, edgeid, and let that server die in peace. While Gtagaming continues on a new fresh server, edgenetwork being no more than just the business name behind it.

But hlgaming is now in the way of that, because I don't feel like I can just delete it anymore.

I own the domain for another year, but I suppose I can give you free use of it to work out what you want to do. Bottom line, I don't want to support any site other than gtagaming anymore. Also, I never knew IGN were shutting down their free hosting but all the same I'm not surprised, because it falls in line with the same reason I'm abandoning edgenetwork - there is no money in free hosted sites anymore.

Anyway this isn't happening immediately, there's countless sites still on the server I'm allowing for to leave first, although the longer this takes the longer gtagaming is stuck on a machine that is struggling to cope with it's traffic.
If you decide to continue with the site I can work out transferring it to you later.

This was the last time I heard from him.  I have tried to contact him time and time again to get the domain transferred and more importantly the databases (I already had backed up the files from FTP) but to no avail.  I tried finding his home address, phone numbers (the ones I had were disconnected.  I then tried twitter, Facebook (he is on my friends list), and ICQ (remember that service).

Then I tried contacting other members of the former EdgeNetwork staff but they had no contact information of his as well.  So by this time it is late 2011 and HLGaming.com is completely shut down and I am locked out of FTP, webmaster, and the other services.  So I have finally decided to contact a Private Investigator to find him and contact him.  This will cost me a bit of money but it is something I have to do…both to save your data and to save my reputation.

Hosting

Now once I get the data back (and I still think I will) I can either host you on my new dedicated server for free again or if you wish (and I don’t blame you) give you your data and pay for a free month of service over at BlueHost.  My new server is backed up 4 times a day so data loss is a moot point if you do choose to stay with me...but again I understand if you choose to leave me.

I am deeply sorry that I have not made what is going on apparent but I hope that this post clarifies what is going on.

This coming Monday I will be contacting a Private Investigator to locate Shawn.

If you wish to contact me further please DM me on Twitter @HL2Gaming

• Valve is offering Left 4 Dead 2 at a 50% discount
• the TF2 blog has an article on custom content from the community
• Age of Chivalry/ has a job opening for an Animator
• Sven Co-op released its Contest map pack
• Jailbreak Source/’s 0.6.1 release is coming up on March 27th and they are throwing a party :)
• Jurassic Life/ has posted a small mod update
• Kontrol is showing off its first custom NPC
• Operation Vault Assault has a small update and is in need of help
• Kingdoms Collide released a patch for beta 1.1 a few days ago.  This patch fixes a lot of bugs
• Puzzlr is looking for people to participate in its beta 2 program
• Stalker City has posted a new weapon model
• Jmod is showing off some screenshots of their Air Support System
• Price of Victory has shut down operations
• Metroid Prime Source has a bit of an update

Testing blockquote

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, CA (March 01, 2010) - Welcome to the new Half-Life Gaming website. The aging PHP backend has been replaced with ASP.NET C# 3.5/4.0. The backend for the site was originally done about ten years ago and was starting to show its age. If you have not heard, Half-Life Gaming and edgeNetwork are splitting ways. Half-Life Gaming thanks Shawn Harkin for the years of patience and support in providing countless websites hosting over the past decade.

To put it simply, there is no money in hosting websites for free. IGN shut down all free hosted sites last year for this very reason. Half-Life Gaming is in a position now to help keep a part of gaming history alive and well. For that reason we are going to keep Half-Life Gaming open for the foreseeable future.

Over the next few weeks, hosted sites will begin to move over to the new server.

About Half-Life Gaming / MJCS Studios

Headquartered in rolling hills of Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, south of Los Angeles and North of San Diego, MJCS Studios is an Independent designer and developer of websites, videos, and provider of game servers. The owner of Half-Life Gaming / MJCS Studios has been credited with supporting the Half-Life community since 2000 with the launch of GlobalTFC.

About edgeNetwork / GTA Gaming

Located in Australia, the edgenetwork - also referred to as "Edge Network" - has served the gaming community in some form or another since April of 2000. Originally, their focus was providing quality hosting services exclusively to the gaming community. The edgenetwork once hosted many fan sites including: Black & White, Day of Defeat, Deus Ex Series, Devastation, Games-Fusion.net, Ghost Recon, Halo, Jedi Knight, Legend of Zelda, Need for Speed and many more. In summer of 2009 edgeNetwork announced the closure of all fan sites except for GTA Gaming and HL Gaming.

• Probably why most of you enjoy coming to this site is/was the constant update of news. Now you can post the news like I enjoy doing or summarize the news post and also quote a bit from the mod. Keen writing and communication skills are a must in this position as well as a broadband internet connection to upload pictures.

• Something that HLG has been lacking for some time is a nice selection of downloads. You would be responsible of obtaining, uploading and cataloging files pertaining to Half-Life and related subject matter. A broadband connection is required for this position like all of the others.

• You can be a news poster, file uploader and do content review or just do content reviews; it does not matter. What does matter is knowledge of the community, what is going on, excellent communication skills and most importantly, great writing skills. With this position you would also be working with me to keep all of the other non-news pages up-to-date.

• Are you able to dedicate a few hours every week to doing your job?


• Are you mature and professional enough to be working here? (You must be 18 or older)


• Able to have fun with this?

• Sliding features section (will grow beyond 2 items)


• Reformatted the top 5 news and files block to accommodate the removal of the links above the main feature


• Toolbar at top of site for quick links to popular sections


• Statistics next to the Advertisement


• News titles link directly to that news item


• Updated RSS to link directly to specific news item


• Fixed a broken table that was causing some errors in certain browsers