SFGAmWiki:News

Welcome to the news section for the SFGAmWiki! This page will provide important announcements or information regarding the SFGAmWiki, SFGAmZone, and any other major Great America-related fan sites. Features are added by Sysops.

11/21/08 - SFGAmZone Video Channel goes Online today
SFGAm Zone announced today it would be relocating all of its park videos to a new hosting service at Vimeo, in response to YouTube pulling both major videos from the 2007 season; the 2007 Slideshow, and the 2007 Fright Fest video; due to "copyright infringement" claims.

While certain music was used in the videos, the creators were clearly acknowledged that they created the songs. To avoid further problems, SFGAmZone is relocating all of its videos to Vimeo and will likely pull out of YouTube entirely.

11/15/08 - SFGAmZone Releases Details of Reconstruction Project
SFGAm Zone, the discussion and media outlet for the SFGAmWiki, released its plans for a major overhaul yesterday. The message reads the following:

SFGAmZone's reconstruction will begin promptly at 12:00 midnight, Monday November 24th. At that time, SFGAmZone will shut down and all members will be asked to create accounts at the Backup Forum to continue any discussions there. The Backup Forum is located at: SFGAmZone Backup Forum

''Work will begin immediately and continue for as long as it takes until reconstruction is done. I will start first on converting the Ride Reviews forum into the Guest Experiences forum, where guests can review and leave commentary on everything the park has to offer,  including rides, games, shows, food, employee experiences, and more.'' ''Once that is finished, select forums will be either eliminated or moved around. The "Other Chicago Parks" forum will be eliminated and merged into the General forum due to its low activity level. "The Vault" will be split from the SFGAmZone Forums category and into a new category called "Archives". Also joining the Vault in the Archives category will be the Dumpster. While the Vault will be a Read-Only forum, the Dumpster will remain open to posting in the crap threads moved there. This should only take a day or two.'' ''The final stage will be switching the forum to the new style, and switching the board's web address to "http://forums.sfgamzone.com". The appearance switchover will take two days to complete due to graphics and buttons that will need to be made for the new forums. We have already secured the domain SFGAmZone.com, so the domain switchover will only take a  few minutes.'' ''Work on the site will be done during the late-night hours because of my busy work/school schedules in the daytime. Work will occur particularly around 11pm until anywhere between 1 and 3am, depending on how tired I am. You will only be able to see the appearance switchover, the rest will be blocked by a message redirecting you to the Backup Forum.'' Assuming there are no issues, things should be fully up and running, and we will re-open on December 8th, 2008.

This message will be sent to every member's email inboxes so everyone knows that the site will be down and you will need to create accounts at the Backup forums to continue the fun.

10/3/08 - SFGAmWiki Back Online after ScribbleWiki Blunder
Welcome to the new and slightly improved SFGAmWiki! I suppose you all are wondering why we are now hosted by Wikia, so here's a brief overview of the situation from last two weeks.

In mid-September, all Wikis created using Simon Koldyk's ScribbleWiki service went offline for unknown reasons. Several days passed and the only decent update ScribbleWiki users were provided was "We’re talking to our data centre right now, it seems to be a network problem on their end."

Nearly two weeks passed before Simon sent an email to all the admins of Wikis made under their service announcing that ScribbleWiki was shutting down all service due to a failure in their backup server. All Wikis created using ScribbleWiki were lost, including SFGAmWiki.

The email states that Admins that subscribed to the premium Ad-Free Service would get all of their payment money refunded. But, as of 10/3/08, I have not received a cent, and he will not respond to my emails.

While we lost nearly everything the Google Cache didn't grab, we do get some new features under the Wikia service. We have on the front page a Featured Article section and a Featured Photo section added, and we have a more customizable layout. Eventually the grey and yellow scheme will be changed to a red and blue theme to match the Great America theme to this Wiki.

If you have come here from SFGAmZone or SFGAmWorld, I strongly urge you to help out around here! Although I did recover the insanely-long standards articles from the Google Cache, we still need to get articles restored as quickly as possible before the Google Cache erases it. Please do what you can to get the pages back to how they looked before the ScribbleWiki Crash!

Thanks to everyone who stuck with us through this situation, and welcome those that are discovering this new Information Database for Six Flags Great America for the first time!

--Jonrev 05:05, 3 October 2008 (UTC)