DK, I appreciate your concerns and will make the following quick-ish comment.
A number of issues have caused a reduction in the number of active Admins available to actively administer the server and forums on a daily basis. Reasons vary from changes of family circumstance, (both growing families and parents moving house) through job related issues. A number of us have changed jobs, or have seen the companies that we have been working for, or even just left cease trading. Paying the bills has been a priority for many, to the exclusion of their presence on the server. For my own part, the hours I am current working mean that I am more likely to fall asleep infront of the TV in the evening, rather than get on the server, into the coding or spending time responding to stuff on the forum.
We have also experienced a number of server related issues. However, due to the work done by 500 Servers staff a lot of these issues have been hidden from server users. It has however meant that we have not always been able to make even simple configuration changes that would allow another event to be run. Investment by 500 Severs in new hardware should hopefully mean that these outages have been addressed, though the law of sod has struck even this, new servers failing in early use and contracted support services managing to then wipe good servers instead of fixing the bad.
Obviously during this time we have had quite a lot of contact with 500 servers, and as a result of the commitment shown by them have added a Demo server. At the moment there have been no code enhancements for this, and there are limitations that having no layout causes and which we recognise. Obviously we do want to do something about both the bank and the shop, but it will take a little time. At the moment we are feeling our way with the Demo server... we need to see if it does get used, what LFS Demo content may be in any future patches and how we might otherwise use it (eg: events / races).
As far as events go, bitter experience has shown us that until we have the config set we shouldn't announce an event as if we can't do it on time it becomes somewhat embarrassing. We do have a couple of long weekends coming up in the UK, this weekend and next (Royal Wedding and all that), so I am hoping to run a couple of short notice events, and indeed set something special up on the day of the Royal Wedding (Friday 29th April). However this does need a little coding, so I am not committing to it until the code is done, or saying what it is (no LFS dev like announcements here
![innocent :innocent:](./images/smilies/1st_innocent.gif)
).
As far as the OPC event goes.... well that's OPC. They haven't managed to organise themselves as yet.
In short we are here, we aren't not communicating because we don't want to, but we are busy and are concentrating in the first instance in keeping the server (now servers) up and running in the first place.