Latest news from the Grand Exchange Central

I am back from a week long vacation (was exploring Kentucky - loved it) and I do plan to resume more or less regular postings.

Meanwhile, here is the latest update from Absenm about the Grand Exchange Central reopening. Almost there!

Well, The Grand Exchange Central is about 80% up and running. Just cleaning up a few issues. It may seem that two months was an awful long time to fix our security issues. But we needed to use what little time we had to make sure we didn't face these issues again.

First of all, you will see that the site looks pretty much the same. That is because we focused on stuff in the background. Redundant security and visitor protection was paramount. But we also managed to make most pages load up to 4x faster. We also tweaked certain formulas, to make our lists more reasonable in what they display.

The Mock Grand Exchange portion of the site will still be down till summer. The MGE had major issues, and it seemed it was better to simply start fresh with it; building on a foundation focused on security first, and learning from our technical challenges of the past to make an overall better mock exchange.

We are in talks with other fan sites about hosting our forums. Forums are a terrible security risk for a site, and having an outside forums host will protect the main site from attack. In the end, the GEC was never about the forums, so having a trusted fansite take that responsibility just makes a lot of security sense.

Obviously, you'll see nothing new on our site from a visitor stand point. All these months of work went into a foundation based on security. But we did implement some tweaks that will also help us expand in the future.

I'd like to thank everyone who was concerned with our issues, and sent me and the GEC their best wishes for our return. We are almost there, and I hope our former visitors will check us out again and be reminded of why they liked us so much.

Thank you again, Absenm