There is a bit of a story behind the conception and the eventual birth of eFragz 3.0, so this is probably the best place to bring you all up to speed. Back in the days of eFragz 2.0, some six years ago now, I was the graphics man, working for the creator of eFragz both in my professional career and eFragz. The site was created and I produced the graphical assets and spent a lot of the time arguing about layout, design and the features that would be available. With the help of Monkey we won some battles and lost others, the site launched and at the time it was vastly superior to eFragz 1.0. I saw eFragz 1.0 once and all I can remember is a grey logo, different to what we have today and a lot of black. eFragz 2.0 has served us well and as the creator moved on I inherited the mechanic role for the site, keeping it alive and hugging it occasionally.

Over the years Team eFragz have had some amazing ideas that we wanted to bring to you, the community. The setup, style and tech of 2.0 kept getting in the way. We always seemed to end up at the same conclusion that it would be easier to draw a line in the sand and start again. Building a community website from the ground up takes a lot of time and planning and due to the admin team having full time jobs, families and games to play it never really got off the ground.

Rick - our Northern web guru started the ball rolling by pushing the rest of the Admin Team towards the idea of upgrading the forums to at least keep eFragz 2.0 current and up to date. Progress was made in the background but ultimately life hindered us all and Rick was made an offer he couldn’t refuse and took the dream job. This again left us in the situation of facing a mammoth task and not a lot of time to complete it.

I have tried to add different features to 2.0 over the years to highlight topics and try and freshen it up. I can say looking back I failed miserably and you the community through the use of the forums have made the site interesting, current and fun to be around. The articles for new games, latest news, in depth discussions that you have shoe-horned into an aging forum have provided me personally with hours of entertainment. I thank you all for your contributions and hope that the new eFragz community site will give you better tools and more flexibility to do what you do.

Why now and what were the main goals? Well that would be a simple answer of me, finally having enough of fighting my nemesis (eFragz 2.0), throwing my toys out and the switch flicking in my head. “Right that’s it! Screw you site, time to die!” The main goals for the new site were simple, make it easier to administer, provide greater flexibility and make use of the new and common place technologies that the old site never even dreamed of. Another main focus of mine was to provide the features that the community have always asked for and brighten up the look and feel to bring us up to date. The biggest goal was to make eFragz a home for the community, a place with enough on offer and enough to do that it's worth logging in every day and hanging out there.

eFragz as an organisation and a community has evolved since eFragz 2.0. We used to be all about LAN’s and the site was a by-product, now with the improvement in online connectivity, gaming and social media eFragz.net is where all the action is. The LAN’s now are a special occasion, a big event that helps galvanise us, the community. eFragz has had to adapt and we are now, eFragz - the community with the added bonus of kickass LAN‘s.

So, how can things still be the same with a new site, is it still your eFragz?, Can it still be your hub for gaming? How can the site be like the old one? This is simple - you, the community. You have made it what it is today, so just keep coming back. How can the site be the hub for our gaming? The community hub enables the creation of groups and events; you can set them up and help people with similar gaming tastes find you. Set events, get a bunch of people that play a certain game to turn up at a time to play; we all know more people playing multiplayer is more fun. You have a chat bar that you can use to create chat rooms or instant message any member signed into the site and get a game on.

You now have a profile within the community hub where you can create photo galleries and upload photos to share. You can share videos from YouTube, it is your space to show the rest of the community what you think is great or what makes you laugh. I can’t wait to see what you all end up with in your photo and video sections; there are some rules however, so no nasty’s I’m afraid. Within your profile you have the facility to add your Steam, Xfire, Xbox live and PSN gamer tags to help people find you and to help you find other members to play with. You can add your Twitter account and use your profile as a Twitter reader. Please note that once you add this your eFragz community status gets tweeted when you change it. You can also add an RSS feed in, which again turns your profile into a reader.

The site hosts achievements, yes achievements for doing stuff around the site, just use it and let the bling roll in. There are now blogs on the site from Admins and Contributors, keeping you up to date on gaming news, adventures in the digital world, adventures in the jungle and my favourite, StarCraft II  The site can now properly display articles, no more forum posts fudged to be articles, proper articles and features. We have a shout box, yes, see I do listen - a shout box! Looking forward to the Briffy Box in the future though  The forums can now embed videos and pictures are automatically resized and are the latest and greatest phpBB has to offer.

Right that is the pimping out the way, how was putting it all together? Well, four months of work and any free time has gone into 3.0, whether it was reading or doing. It was hard but very rewarding. I will admit I had no clue about the majority of the technology and have had to teach myself pretty much all of it. The amount I have learnt has made it worth it from a selfish point of view, but more importantly I hope the site reflects how much I appreciate and love the eFragz community. I won’t go into the bugs, fixes, rethinks, iterations and all the fine detail of how much tech is in the site as I will be here for months. What I will say is Wow! what a ride, for the first time I am truly proud of this achievement and really can’t wait to see how the community settles in to its new home.

I can’t take all of the credit and would like to thank the eFragz Admin Team and the Testers, Guys you have been a tremendous help. Words of encouragement and finding stuff for me to fix

Special thanks to Aavak, Mooshy, SlayerJohn, Meso_tech, Mead0s and Monkey, guys seriously without the advice, ideas, fixes, encouragement and generally being on the end of a phone, the site would be nowhere near what it is today.

The biggest thanks needs to go to Mrs B0b, the patience, the understanding, the picking me up and for believing.