(http://www.omnimaga.org/images/omniold.jpg)
8 months after the original forum shut down and 6 months after the website closing, Omnimaga is back. Increasing requests for a fresh new board meant as a permanent one have lead to discussion about the matter, which ended with the decision to revive Omnimaga website. So this is why now you are on this website and not the music folders.
Old Omnimaga members probably remember the old site shutted down after problems between people from #tcpa and #omnimaga and it seemed like it would be better that Omnimaga close to end this whole rivalry caused by the high difference between both places and the fact the two IRC channels always have been the two most active TI calculator related ones since #omnimaga moved to Dragon-Fire in 2006. However, the #omnimaga channel did not close, due to it being owned by someone else, and most people wanted the old board to return and a temporary board to use until it's back. But the temporary board died as signs that the old board would not be coming back in a close future began to appear so a deadline was set on March 1st saying Omnimaga would be closing if the old site was not back within that timeframe. So this is what happened eventually, through spam attacks on IRC and two forum raids that even forced us to disable registration for a while. Omnimaga became solely an IRC channel and the only remains of Omnimaga were the music. The only staff that remained are music producers and two channel admins including myself.
5 months after the closing, requests for a new forum started to rise, becoming more and more frequent, even with offers for help to rebuild a new site. Discussions ensued in private with old staff members, and we came to the decision that we should restart a permanent board not meant as a tempoary replacment to the old site until it returns, to not give false hope to people. So on August 25th work began, a SMF got installed on my web hosting, to ensure we will always have access to board files and backups, unlike with Invisionfree and Zetaboards, so if something bad happened again it would only take a few days to put the site back up. A new forum skin based on Omnimaga 1.2 and 3.0 was made by me with the help of tr1p1ea to modify the board template.
And then today, 7 years day for day after Omnimaga was founded, the website reopen it's doors. A new programming team will rise at the same time that old files are re-added to the website.
some improvements were made compared to the old website aside from the move away from Invisionfree:
-New download system featuring rating system, download and view count, top download and recent files added. it's still rather empty but old files will be added back to it whenever I get free time.
-View new posts feature. Easier to track new posts when you don't visit the forum for more than 24 hours.
-Unread replies feature to view which of your topics got new replies.
-Better looking portal and since it's more customizeable more stuff could be added in a easier way, such as staff list, link to download and forum statistics and project list. More might be added later.
-Better looking forum skin. The previous one was good, but some people found it a bit too dark so I decided to go with something lighter, but not too light either and still true to Omnimaga.
-More in depth forum statistics
-Less bugs
As for the current staff, me and Netham45 will be the only administrators. Netham45 owns the IRC channel and is IRC operator on its host, Dragon-Fire (irc://unitedti.org), due to the owner being inactive. The Manager usergroup is no longer existing, as the entire Coders Of Tomorrow staff now have global moderating priviledges in case another raid would occur. They used to only have power in their own project sub-forums. Their nick also got changed from red to the former manager user group, green. At the time this new is written, current Coders Of Tomorrow are Art_Of_Camelot, bfr, calc84maniac, Luna, Necro (altough he doesn't have an account yet), Nitacku and Speler, calc84maniac and Luna being the only two who were not part of the staff prior the closing. We are currently hiring mostly on IRC, but an announcment will be made about it later when the site is more complete.
Don't forget to check their project sub-forum soon for updates on amazing TI-83+ and TI-84+ games such as a Super Mario Bros 3 type game, an amazing xLIB/Celtic RPG, a four level grayscale kit also for xLIB and Celtic and Lorn, a great looking Windows platformer. Other projects will be revealed soon, altough some information might have alerady been leaked on IRC.
I hope you will like the new site and enjoy your stay.