On Friday Virus is gitting us gud with his second PVP mission. Lock 'n loadaruu!

Two individual instances of training this week - Netheral is hosting some more SL/PltHQ training on Thursday 9th. Be a true RTS gamer.

On Saturday the 11th, Slouchy is taking more FNGs through their paces with his Simple Sessions. Become a bona-fide badass here.

On top of that, Woody is planning to host some Unsung mod Vietnam missions - we have 1 Zeus template & some scripted missions ready to rock! Grab your Steel Pot & your M16 and get ready to do some Zippo raids!

We're still holding our FK Merch design competition - get your designs posted up here!

Starting next week, I will be grabbing some of your awesome posts to feature here too; but for now :

Sarissa awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

As a result of the leak, we have decided to bring down the repo for the time being to fix the issues caused by these actions. This means the repo will be down the entire weekend and no official ArmA-sessions will be played until further notice. For his defiance of the admin/CM team and the leaking of critical information on a public NON-FK channel, the instigator called 'Pretmaker' has been banned from any and all FK-related services.
We take the privacy and security of all FK members very seriously. People trying to circumvent this safety will not be tolerated.

We want to thank Linnet for reporting this grave issue to us. We encourage people who experience similar situations that (could) bring damage to FK to report this as soon as possible to a CM/Admin.
You can read Linnet's explanation in this thread.

We want to take this opportunity to tell People they SHOULD NOT feel like they will be shunned if they were to "snitch" so to speak, because, quite frankly, they're doing the rest of the community a favour. If you are one of those people who start shunning others for openly reporting persons for stuff they shouldn't be doing, then you're honestly no better than the people who are being dickheads and/or breaking/circumventing rules. It shouldn't matter if said person is your friend. If you keep quiet about this, the community as a whole will become stagnant as little things build up and eventually collapse under the combined weight of these issues. If you see someone else has reported your friend for being a dickhead, don't be a dickhead yourself and start shunning that person and/or getting others to shun them.

To wrap it up, don't be afraid to openly report any infractions to the CMs/Admins or even Vets to get them to pass it up to us. The Anonymous Feedback system is still there if you feel afraid of backlash from the community, or at least from a small group of people, but we would much prefer if this became a community where the community itself is not afraid to report people for things that they shouldn't be doing. If we find out that anyone is being a dickhead or shunning people for "snitching", they will be dealt with harshly! We want people to be able to bring their issues out in public where we can have a civil discussion about it. Remember though, if you post an issue, make sure to provide valid points supporting your claims! 

Meeting reports and other various announcements have been moved to our fancy new community announcements section.

Such as this week's report, which is now up! 

It can be found here.

Some of you may know that before we created FK, the fellow ARMA clan NoPryl used to host a server for the ZF guys and most of the CM team used to/still play with them. However, they've recently lost a huge amount of players, dropping from the usual 40-50 players on a Tuesday mission to only 20-25. Therefore, to show our appreciation for all they've done, we've decided to give them a shoutout and introduce them to you guys. If you want to learn more about them check out this thread: 

First of all: Why me? I never made a big secret about the fact that I have been working in the gaming industry for the last 3, 3 ½ years (for the germans: playnation.de ). Mostly as an editor, but since the company I wrote for had a very large outreach, with time I learned not only to write SEO news and articles, video-concepts, interviews and press releases but also how to communicate with Game Developers, Publishers and how to relay important information to the public, organize meetings, all of that stuff. I know a fair bit about how Publishers work and think, what they want out of their clients and therefore became quite good at selling ideas and concepts to them.

About 3 weeks after I joined this community I asked the CMs if they ever thought about contacting Bohemia in an official manner. This plan is still on the way, stuff like the Repo-Update, the general workload that came with 64bit and other things relayed that plan a bit, also formulating what exactly we can realistically ask from and offer to them has to be carefully established. So much for the official PR-part.

But that's not all. After all, the role says “PR and Communications”, not only “PR”. Communication in a community of this size is fundamental, the issues we have with this should be well known by now. So I won't only be responsible for the official contact but also will be making sure that the information given from the CMs to all of you guys has a clear line, structure and especially completeness. Furthermore I am more than happy to act as a mediator between all of you. Over the years in the media industry I learned to take every possible view into consideration, test systems and ideas for flaws – but also to not feel personally attacked when people criticize my professional work or projects I was part of (seriously, if you ever want to take on a job in the media, learn to not give a shit or it'll break you!). There's always room for improvement, people who have a different view on things or ideas of how things should be run. Sorting out, through open and biased-free communication, what's seen as a problem and how people see room for improvements is vital for a healthy PR – so that's what I'm here for.

So – that's basically what I'll do here. Talk. About the important, very official stuff as well as the feedback and ideas that all of you bring to this community. Take a bit of load off the CMs while making sure that certain things within my power get handled more satisfactory for everybody involved.

This is a follow up post to further specify and clarify the rules and restrictions of any sort of formal and informal communication with official instances regarding anything that is planned or discussed in the FK community: 
Now let me be very clear about this: Under no circumstances at all is anyone of you allowed to address a publisher, developer, gaming site or anything like that at all, especially not without previous communication and the clear "go" from myself and the CM- and Admin-team, in the name of the FK community or concerning anything officially related to it. We decided to have a PR and Communications role for good reasons and thought that by announcing my field of responsibilities in this previous post, made a clear point for why this is in the best interest of this community. Since that doesn't seem to be the case - let me give you further details on that: 

The gaming industry, widely if not totally, using the internet as resource and method of communication, is fast paced and - now I'm sure you all have heard this sentence before - does not forget. At all. What is on the internet stays on the internet, therefore we have to be very careful about the content we decide to use to officially present ourselves and this community to any higher instance. Publishers and Developers cannot afford to allow themselves to associate in collaborations without background-checking everything, otherwise things can turn into a massive PR-disaster really quickly. As of the nature of the internet and online communication, rumors spread very quickly, once you've owned a certain reputation, you will never ever get rid of it ever again, especially not in the eyes of renowned instances (like in our case, Bohemia). Because of this, deciding what content or idea we want to officially bring forward and present has to be chosen very, very carefully. 

Therefore, please, if you have an idea you want to bring forward officially, ask yourself: Does this represent the community and yourself in the way you want it to be seen? If the answer is yes, don't act on it until you have communicated it with us. Don't ever think that it is ok to decide for yourself and without the permission of the CMs, Admins and myself in matters of this community. If you do so, be sure that this behavior, from this point forward, will not be tolerated, nor will the outcome be of any help for the community. The time, effort and nerves it needs to clean up a mess like this can and should be used in other ways, this I can guarantee you. The potential brand it marks FK with can be, in the worst case, detrimental to the image of this community and possibly beyond repair. 

So again, let me be very clear: Do never ever reach out to official instances on the behalf of FK, for an FK project or for anything that could even be slightly connected to this community without permission and supervision. Ever. 

You can view it here.

You can read the guides via our new Guides button, or click the link here.

This is not a start to tags and training - this is preparation only.

To check out the FKBranded store, visit this link.

There is a possibility of ordering a Hoodie with your own chosen text printed on as well, for an increased price. To do this, head to this thread, tell us what you want on the item and Sarissa will make an order once per month.

While browsing youtube for some of last years releases and demos my eye fell on a video about memes. Not the “memes” you all know from the likes of Woody, but actual memes. The ones you just have to look at to know what they are about, the ones that don’t require text to explain the meaning. Because no matter how much text you slap on it, a picture of a pile of shit will still be a picture of a pile of shit! [Woody!]

Hearing some of the tunes in this video reminded me of the days when I first joined an online gaming community. Which in turn got me thinking about how I became a server admin. So now instead of writing a story about gamescom I decided I would tell you the story of how I became the server admin I am today.

The video that messed with my plans

How it started

Back in 2004 I was already following a study in server management, but that was mostly focused on windows. My linux experience had not gotten past the experimenting phase. I spent my free hours playing computer games one of which was Counterstrike. It was while I was playing CS that I stumbled upon a group of people who called themselves Coltkillaz. It was one of those groups that had this great atmosphere around them, a group that made you feel welcome from day 1. A group I ended up gaming with for well over 5 years.

Within this group was a guy named Davros, a tech savvy guy who at some point in 2005/2006 started managing their servers. For whatever reason around the end of 2006 he offered me a dedicated server to play around with, it was a server that he no longer had any use for. It was this server that gave me the linux virus and it was this server that hosted my very first website.

Logo of the community that started it all.

The linux bug

With this new love for linux and the end of my studies nearing I applied for a trainee ship at a large telecom company. At the start of 2007 I was accepted and started my journey in an environment of which 90% consisted of unix systems. I quickly realised how much fun it was to script your daily tasks. To find ways to make your life as an administrator easier. After my trainee ship I was offered a contract and ended up staying with them for 7 years.

The downside of those 7 years was that I mostly worked with company proprietary tools. A lot of the software we used was made by the company and therefore it was a very specific knowledge. Knowledge that I would not use anymore after leaving the company. My linux knowledge stayed fairly vanilla until mid 2015. After having been with a new company for about a year I got offered a job at a well known unix consultancy agency. That's when I got introduced to the world of tools people use in the linux world. I got a chance to certify myself and train myself. In just over 2 years I went from having some knowledge about linux to being an expert in linux.

An accurate description of how I see linux

Playing around

Of course using this knowledge on a daily basis for work is one thing, however it is outside of work that you get to play with new tools and learn new things. And the best way to do that is by having a goal like keeping game servers up and running. That brings me back to Coltkillaz. By the end of 2013 Coltkillaz was winding down, real life had taken over and for the most of us that meant no more time for gaming. The odd game I did play was with friends I met over the years of gaming and attending lan parties (more on that in another story).

At the start of 2014 I started 71st vanguards with a few friends. The game of choosing at the time was battlefield and for just over a year we had one of the busiest BF3 servers in europe. A website was made and a teamspeak was hosted. All of this was tied together by some tooling I had discovered years before. The 71st servers gave me a playground to test and try new things. Always looking to make things easier on me and others. Sadly this time it was my turn to have real life take over and by 2016 I was hardly playing games or managing servers. The lack of playing with technology left me without a way to relax, and by the end of 2016 the urge to have a playground urged me to send a PM to greybeardralph asking him if he needed help with the server. And we all know what happened next....

Problem? (See woody, thats how you use a meme!)

Some of you might remember the weekly meeting reports/overviews that the CM-Team did a while ago. Well, this is a try on bringing those back. But better! With more content, more info, more trivia and - I can't believe I'm actually saying that - more memes.
This is thought to serve as a weekly report, including a link to the meeting report, a short overview of upcoming events and specials in the week ahead and maybe, depending on the material I have, a small best-of of this weeks "mishaps", memes and incidents. So let's start this, shall we?

Meeting Report: 
As always, the meeting report has already been uploaded, you can find it here. 

REPO UPDATE!
You've read that correctly, we're updating the Repo on MONDAY THE 17TH! Therefore even those of you who get their internet delivered via smoke signals on a particularly windy day will be able to play Arma at the weekend. Please keep in mind that a lot of people will try to update at the same time, aka the download-speed will be literal hell. So don't panic, the community isn't dying, those of you who have been around longer than 2 weeks will already know how this works. 

Upcoming Events:
Not much is planned for the upcoming week - yet. On friday @TEG is organizing a TTT-game. So if you have GMod and a free friday afternoon, you might want to give it a go! 

And the award for the most hilarious Zeus fuckup goes to....
@Tomo 
For a really innovative use of fellow players
https://clips.twitch.tv/OddAcceptableCheddarKappaPride

So far for this week, if you have any suggestions what you'd like to see in here (e.g. Mission Report of the week/pictures/mission screenshots, whatever really) let me know, send it to me and I'll see what I can use. And no @Woody don't even try. I'll never feature you here. That will be the biggest of all memes. 

Gamescom 2017 coverage:

As some of you have probably heard, a few of the FK members are planning to visit gamescom this year. As the world's largest event for computer and video games there will be something to see for everyone. The event hall will cover a whopping 201,000 square metres and that is a lot of ground to cover.

This got me to think. To optimize our coverage for our community I want to know from you all what you would like to see. I have opened up the comments section for this article, use it to let us know what you want to see covered. Keep the requests clean and friendly and we will do our best to get you the information you want.

Morning/evening/good whatever time you're reading this everybody!

Let's get right to it:

Meeting report

Other than this overview, last weeks meeting report has actually been on time. You can view it here if you haven't already because you're an upstanding member of the community and are excited for the off-chance of new rules being announced (spoilers?). 

What's happening this week? 

Not much, again.  Because of the overambitious spawn of EI, the mission by @NeilZar from earlier this week has been rescheduled to friday. Keep in mind that this is a scripted mission with a few pre-assigned slots, so if you had one in the original mission, you'll have it on friday. If you can't make it - fine. But please let Neil know beforehand so we don't spend unnecessary time with waiting for people who are not going to appear. Check out the Calender Event for more info. 

Also, a few might have seen it already on the Forum, @Slouchy Orc is currently lost somewhere in the canadian wilderness, doing biological stuff and hopefully avoids getting eaten by Grizzlys. Read up on it here. While he is gone, @Chuck Yeager will take over the Training Missions, now renamed to "Chucks Convenient Classes". The first one of these is happening on monday, if you are an FNG or haven't been playing with us in a while, I'd suggest you try them out. Every further info is on the Calender Event.

Now - the sad part. @Woody will be gone from friday on - hopefully not forever. Something along the lines of driving tanks IRL and "teaching them how to fly". Go nag him about it yourself. At this point we haven't come up with a plan on how we're going to survive without his memes and horrific flying accidents, but we'll make it. Somehow. 

A bit more lighthearted

First of all - check out this thread. What is your unique, based on real events FK-fear? 

Furthermore: @anden3 asked me to raise awareness for this. Apparently there's a Rocket League Tournament coming along. So if one of your unique skills is crashing into cars and fucking things up while pretending to hit a giant football, this could be the perfect event for you.

Until next week!

PS: Be nice to your medics, patching you guys op is fucking hard work. Especially when the system is broken.