Tag Archives: Community

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown.

If you’re tried to visit the NLSC throughout this week, you’ll have found that we’ve been out of service for much of it. If you’re reading this now, however, chances are everything is back to normal and our big server move is finally complete. I was hoping to avoid having this much downtime, but we ran into a few complications along the way. As I’m writing this week’s column, we’re fortunately in the home stretch of the server move, and it won’t be long before it’ll be business as usual. As you can probably imagine, I’m quite relieved!

I’ve mentioned before that in running the NLSC for all these years, I’ve learned a thing or two. I’ve gained fascinating insights into the development of basketball video games, and through my duties in the NLSC Forum, I’ve learned about dealing with different types of personalities. Through developing content and implementing new features for the NLSC, I’ve also gained some useful technical skills and knowledge. Undertaking our most recent server move has certainly been a learning experience too, so I thought I’d reflect upon that in this week’s Five. Without any further ado, here are five things that I learned moving the NLSC to a new server.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games.

As I write this week’s Monday Tip-Off, we’re still preparing to move to our new server. We’ve encountered a couple of snags, but if all goes well, we’ll be at our new home within the next couple of days, hopefully with as few interruptions as possible. My apologies for the downtime in the Forum and Downloads section in the past twenty-four hours; I had anticipated a quicker move, and did not want to jeopardise the proceedings that were already underway. There will be some further interruptions and downtime as we complete the move, but if you’re reading this, we’re either back up and running temporarily, or the move is complete.

In trying to sort out the server move over the weekend, as well as taking care of a couple of other matters, I haven’t had an opportunity to prepare a column or video feature for today. With Monday rapidly drawing to a close here in Australia, I’ve found myself scrambling to find something to write about, while I continue to take care of matters behind the scenes to get the NLSC onto its new hosting. After tossing around a few ideas, one topic came to mind that was quite obvious, given the circumstances.

What does the NLSC mean to me?

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I have an important announcement about the future of the NLSC. Our current host will be closing their hosting services as of July 7th, so we’ve been making preparations to move to a new home before that happens. I’m pleased to say that we have made the necessary arrangements, and will be moving to a new server in the near future. There will be some downtime while this happens, but everything will be moving across. I’ll try to keep everyone informed as best as possible, via the NLSC Facebook and Twitter accounts.

To keep doing what we’re doing – specifically, providing a Downloads section with upload facilities – the NLSC requires dedicated hosting. Until now, we have received such hosting in exchange for advertising space, which has been a very generous offer to say the least. Unfortunately, there aren’t any deals like that on the table these days, so we are now paying for our own hosting.

Because dedicated hosting is more expensive, and we have been a non-profit website for close to twenty years now, after much thought and consideration, I’ve decided to ask the community for assistance with our hosting costs. At present, we’re looking to raise at least $100 USD per month, which would allow us to cover hosting costs, and put some money towards things like giveaways and content creation.

Let me stress before I go any further: we will not be charging for content! We can’t legally charge for mods (so we certainly won’t be), download and upload facilities will still be free, registration for the Forum will be free, and all our articles and other content will be free. We will not be providing premium content behind a paywall, or making any other sweeping changes. We just need some help paying the bills, because our modding community requires some facilities that we just can’t offer if we’re on cheaper, shared hosting.

Basically, if we can get twenty people donating at least $5 USD per month, we’ll be able to cover our expenses. As I said, should the community’s generosity extend beyond that, I have plans to use those funds for things like monthly giveaways, and new content.

If you’re willing and able to support us, you can do so through Patreon or GoFundMe. I understand the controversy in making an appeal like this, but I do not want to see us go off the air, or lose important features such as our Downloads section and its upload facilities.

On behalf of the NLSC Team, I thank you for your consideration, any contributions you are willing and able to make, and your continued support of everything we do here. Once again, I will try to keep everyone informed about the impending move, which hopefully shouldn’t cause too much of an interruption. I realise that some of you may have some further questions that need concise answers, so please see below for more information. Also, a huge thanks to our current host for all the support, and essentially saving us some eight years ago when we needed to find a new home.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games.

In previous Monday Tip-Off columns, I’ve discussed a few issues related to our modding community: problems with ego, why modders stop modding, and why people make mods for older basketball video games. In a couple of those features, I’ve touched upon the right reasons and the wrong reasons to get involved in the modding scene for basketball video games. While I don’t want to harp on the same topics over and over again, sometimes they do bear repeating, especially when certain issues arise time and time again.

We recently had another incident in the Forum which reminded me that although we are a talented modding community, unfortunately there are some individuals who do have a bad attitude. I suppose it’s inevitable and it’s always disappointing, but it’s perhaps even more disappointing when I see other people defend and enable that behaviour. While everyone is entitled to their own point of view, I’d suggest that you’re betting on the wrong horse if you’re on the side of the person who’s throwing a tantrum like a toddler.

I feel like we need a refresher here, so having said that, what are the right and wrong reasons to mod, the good and the bad attitudes to have towards the hobby?

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