Gameplanet
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| Gameplanet (NZ) Limited | |
 |
|
| Type | Company |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2002 |
| Founder | Simon Barton, Simon Garner |
| Headquarters | Freemans Bay, Auckland |
| Industry | Web Based |
| Products | Gameplanet.co.nz GPStore.co.nz GPForums.co.nz |
| Website | www.gameplanet.co.nz |
Formed in late 1999 and registered as a company in 2002, Gameplanet is one of New Zealand's premier gaming and internet communities. Gameplanet comprises a main website offering reviews/previews of the latest games for both console and PC, servers for a variety of popular internet games such as Counter-Strike and Call of Duty. Gameplanet's sister operation, GPStore, is owned and operated by Virtual Stores (NZ) Ltd, although comprising of a brick and mortar retail presence in Mt Eden, Auckland, as well as the award-winning e-tail offering.
The Gameplanet website has won numerous awards, including the 2006 NetGuide People's Choice Award for best games-related site [1][2].
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[edit] Gameplanet forums
Located at www.gpforums.co.nz. As of Monday, January 1, 2007 it had a total 236,644 threads, 4,962,089 posts, 38,085 members.
The Gameplanet forums are made up of a large number of forums spanning a number of topics. While the main focus of the forums is on gaming, Open Discussion (Formerly Off Topic) is a popular place by gamers and non gamers alike. Open Discussion has a number of subforums including Cars, Bikes & Motorsport and Current Events, Politics and Philosophy.
Many of the Open Discussion members are known for being relatively personal and intimate with many members knowing or having "meat" (Gameplanet term for a GP Meet - named for the traditional barbeque) each other in real life. There have been numerous GP Meats across New Zealand.
Counter-Strike New Zealand. (CSNZ) and its sub-forums serve as the major base of organisation and communication for New Zealand Counter-Strike clan play, forming a large majority of the members and posts on Gameplanet.
[edit] Gameplanet Forums Crash of 2007
The Gameplanet forums crashed on the early morning of Tuesday, 27th February 2007, visitors to the site were greeted with various error messages, as the site admin tried to find the source of the problem. The cause of the crash was due to hardware failure which resulted in corruption of the filesystem on which the database tables are stored. [3]
Restoring the Forums from a previous backup proved futile as it was later found that the backup system had been storing empty backups for the past two weeks due to a configuration error, consequent from the recent changes to the GP Forums server.
At this stage the GP Forums have been restored to a valid backup from January 2005, over 2 years earlier. Effects of this massive wind back in time are being felt as sub-forums have disappeared, adminships have been lost, some re-gained. Most usernames have been restored with reset passwords.
At the time of reporting this, there are now 169,068 threads, 3,142,450 posts, 49,128 members.
Victim Tally (based on January 1st, 2007 figures):
67,000 Threads
1,800,000 Posts
Personal Explanation of error by Egor
Gameplanet Forums went down early this morning due to a hardware failure which resulted in corruption of the filesystem on which the database tables are stored. Unfortunately it was not possible to repair the files.
Then, panic struck as I realised our backup system had been storing empty backups for the past two weeks due to a configuration error, consequent from the recent changes to the GP Forums server. If you have ever felt that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise disaster has struck, you know how I felt when I realised we'd lost the database and all the backups were duds.
Fortunately I was able to find elsewhere this much older backup from Jan 2005. So I'm afraid that's what we've had to use to restore the site.
We were able to restore the usernames of many of the members who registered since that date, but they have all been reset with random passwords. If you can't log in to your account, try using the lost password link to have a new password emailed to you.
To everyone - and in particular those who have lost posts, threads, PMs or their whole account - I'm really sorry. This should never have been allowed to happen (and you can be sure we won't be letting it happen again). But hopefully you'll forgive us, and the show will go on...
[edit] Members of notable mention
- Jason Molloy a.k.a."Sgt Molloy" - Was jailed for hate crimes involving an Auckland mosque. [4] [5].
- Karl Burnett - A member of GPForums who played Nick Harrison in Shortland Street, a New Zealand Soap Opera.
- Craig McMillan - New Zealand cricketer who posts under the alias of JRS
[edit] Gameplanet in the media
[edit] Name Suppression
A user started a thread encouraging users to guess who the celebrities involved in a Cocaine and Ectasy scandal were. Soon, members were posting the names of any celebrity they could think of- some of them, as it turns out, were right. This attracted media attention, as this was breaching name suppression on the said celebrities.[6][7]
On the advice of a lawyer, a user famously said "It's just like talking around a water cooler at the office". This quote was later used by the Dominion Post in a story on the drug scandal and also on TV3 on the current affairs programme Campbell Live, which showed footage of the forums' frontpage as an introductor segment of the show.
Also in early 2005, A quote from a user was read out on NZ Talkback Radio after an All Black beat up his wife. The line was, "yeah, and who knows how lippy that woman was.", which was wittily derived from the NZ film, Once Were Warriors.
[edit] Gameplanet Store Targeted
On 6th March 2007, TV3's reality TV show Target aired a survey they conducted which involved an underage actor attempting to purchase an R18 game in various games shops in the Auckland region. Although one of the staff at Gameplanet was willing to sell an R18 game to a 16 year old, they did ask for an age verification ID with a 13 year old. Gameplanet was not the only store to be caught out, as a high percentage of other game specialist stores were also caught out in the sting.
