The Chaos Engine

Hi All,

As we're sure many of you know, the Online Safety Act in the UK comes into force on March 17th. As a UK hosted and maintained site our community here will fall within the scope of that law, and as drafted, the BilActl would add considerable risk to continued operation. For those not aware of the Act, it will create legal liability for user content, which would fall squarely on the shoulders of the Admin team; Photon, Jaccident, and Tricky. Unfortunately that risk is expounded by the number of disgruntled former users who could use the provisions in the Act to deliberately attack us. In order to meet the minimum requirements for the legislation, there would be an awful lot of work needed. Put simply, it requires too much, from too few, to service a small community like this. Therefore TCE will be taken offline and the content deleted before midnight on March 16th.

Naturally some might wonder how this can be averted; so in the spirit of transparency we want to talk about the two options that were explored and why those options ultimately aren't suitable.

1. Re-domicile the forum to another country
This would mean removing any UK based member from the moderation or admin teams, and then handing over technical control to someone who doesn't fall under the scope of the Act. There are two reasons this process wouldn't solve the issues faced. Firstly the forum as it's currently hosted, is held together by Photon and not in a state to handover, we can't get it there in two months and the time strain on Photon to do so isn't feasible, it can't be a partial handover, Photon will not be able to help in any way shape or form after the Act comes into force. Secondly, there's a significant risk that even if the handover happens and is successful, the UK Government may still classify Photon and Jaccident as people of significant control.
2. Become compliant with the Act's requirements
This would involve getting a rota of moderation in...

Its been a long time without a front page post, and I am afraid that we are not breaking this silence for particularly good news.

We are extremely sad to hear about the passing of long time forum member Rub Icon. He was not only a longer time member of the forum but was a obviously also a long time veteran of the UK games industry, who made a sizable impact among his peers and colleagues. He will be missed dearly.

Our hearts go out to his wife, children and friends and collegues at this difficult time.

[edit] A previous version of this post named the member as Rubicon, not Rub Icon, which was completely and utterly wrong. I do utterly apologise for this mix up.

That time again, see the Irrelevant Corner for details.

Over in the private forums sign-ups are soon to close.
http://www.thechaosengine.com/index.php?threads/tce-secret-santa-fuck-im-late-this-year.76534/

http://thechaosengine.com/index.php?threads/game-of-the-year-2017-nominations.75612/

http://www.thechaosengine.com/index.php?threads/tce-secret-santa-2017.75520/

Nominations for this year's GotY are now open over in Game Reviews.

http://www.thechaosengine.com/index.php?threads/game-of-the-year-2016-nominations.74260

Please make sure to call out your nominations in bold.

We're having outbound email problems...

Basically our email provider has decided to classify everything we send as spam, and bounce it.

This is great, and potentially slightly beyond our control. I'm conducting some experiments, but due to the glorous way things work (tm) this could take a couple of days. You (may) also note that the contact us link has been removed from all pages, as this (may/may not) be part of the problem. In the meantime if you need to contact us, either use facebook or email direct (this will potentially be the solution long term anyway).

In short, I'm on it, but ... well .. damnit. Which one is the off button again?

So, this serves as a timely reminder to update this page a little more often...

We have migrated! Welcome to The Chaos Engine 3.0!

If we were a time-lord, we've only just reached teenage, which I'm sure is fairly apt.

We knew it was time to move when suprise was expressed by various techs that our server hardware was not a rusted lump by now (well, barring the old hard drive of course ...)

Please feel free to discuss changes / report bugs in the newly renamed 'Discuss the Forum' forum - constructive criticism only please, otherwise I might get grumpy...

Enjoy!

Sincere apologies for the delay, the timing couldn't have been less stellar to be honest...

I've checked over the data and it all *seems* fine, please let me know if this is wrong.

Awesome thanks of lovelyness to he who shall not be named for help with recovering the data, and to UK2 for their assistance during the hardware failure.

(For those of you who are not aware, we had a hard drive failure which took down our box, and left us in a slightly embarassing position)

I'm now looking at new backup options, please try not to break anything in the meantime...