As you may have heard, over the past month, we have been running a mapping contest for Deathrun. That mapping contest will be coming to a close in just 2 days (Nov. 1 at 12:00 AM) and the judging will begin. The submissions we have so far are looking great and I hope to see a few more before the contest closes. As mentioned, the prizes that we decided on are as follows:

• First Place: A Steam game with a value of $50 or less
• Second Place: An amazon.com gift card worth $25
• Third Place: Free VIP, or equiv. in dough if you already have vip, worth $15

I have received a few questions about how we will handle all the maps that are submitted. Basically, the top 3 maps will be awarded prizes and any map we deem worthy will be added to the server. For all the information on the current contest please see the official forum post.

In other news, I have recently been developing a bot, cleverly named SassBot, which uses Steam as its medium. Currently SassBot’s only major feature to regular players is that he allows you to talk on web chat without having to use the site. If you’re interested in using Sassbot simply add him and when he accepts (automatic) he will introduce himself and get you started.

Finally, Halloween is upon us and to get into the spirit the site and Lobby have been spruced up with the always appropriate pumpkin. In addition, the Lobby has received spooky and fun Halloween music.

Enjoy!

To celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving in Canada we will be having a VIP sale which starts today and ends on Tuesday (October 10). VIP will only require a donation of $7.50 (50% off). If you were waiting to get your VIP now’s your chance!

Enjoy!

Update
The sale has now ended! Hopefully everyone who wanted to get VIP has gotten it!

I am very pleased to announce the official start of our very first mapping contest. Contestants will be making maps for our Deathrun server and we decided against having a set theme for maps. Contestants will have one month to create their map and submit it by October 31. We are offering great prizes to the maps we deem the winners.

The prizes are:

• A Steam game with a value of $50 or less
• A gift card to Amazon.com, worth $25
• Free VIP, worth $15

Values are in USD, list is not exhaustive

For all the information please visit the official thread on our forums.

We are rolling out a brand new system we call gifts. The basic idea of a gift is to reward you, the players, every time you accomplish a set task. The current gifts that we have are as follows:

Steam Group Gift – Reward: 3000 dough
Join the Sassilization steam group and you will receive 3000 dough! Be careful though, if you leave you will be deducted the 3000 dough!

TF2 Server Gift – Reward: 5000 dough
Join our brand new TF2 server, play for 30 minutes (one FULL map) and you will receive 5000 dough! The address for the server is: tf2.sassilization.com:27016

Add the Owners (and Super Admin) – Reward: 2000 dough each
Get any of the owners or super admins (cold/sassafrass/spacetech/ugly) on your list and get 2000 dough for each one you get!

One caveat, however, with the gifts is that you will not receive them instantly. We have a job running every night (12:00 AM GMT-6) that will check your account to see if you have achieved any. We hope to continue to add and expand to this system so if you have any ideas or comments please drop a post in the official thread.

Today we fell victim to an attack that placed a malicious link at the bottom of every page. As a result of this attack our site has been reported to contain malware, which you may have already noticed. Thanks to Spacetech’s fast reaction all said links have been removed and our site is once again clean. Unfortunately our site is still reported as containing malware and will continue to be blocked by major browsers that it contains malware. We have requested a review of the site and hope to have this resolved as quickly as possible. Thank you for understanding.

Update:
Just to clear up some of the common misconceptions about what has taken place. To start, I have heard many of you saying that there was malware in the jukebox, which is completely false. The only reason why you would have been getting warnings from your anti-virus is due to the help page, which loaded a web page, which would have been infected.

As for the actual resolution of the malware, if it wasn’t obvious enough, we have had our site reviewed and it was deemed to be clean. As such the browser warnings you were seeing (if you were seeing them) should now be gone. Thanks.

I released a small update to Deathrun earlier today which included a new player model and weapon for death’s. I also threw in a fix for the jukebox not showing any songs due to our immense collection.

Update
Just to clarify, the new death player model is set automatically when you are a death on the server. You can not purchase it.

As you all know we’ve had the admin applications under review for quite a while, but we have finally reviewed the candidates and have chosen who we feel will fulfill the role as a Sassilization administrator.

The new administrators are…

• Klesk
• Evil Cyborg 10
• Zero | oreZ
• Sheep
• |NGEN| Dark Elite
• Caesar

We are happy to welcome these new administrators into our team.
And most importantly of all, congratulations!

In light of the recent dough glitch the table which contains all player data has been rolled back 4 days. I already went through and fixed all the VIP’s who had purchased during that time period. Any dough/items you accumulated during the past 4 days will have to be re-earned. Unfortunately this was the best course of action. Thanks for understanding.

Our forums were recently attacked by what is known as a cross site scripting (XSS) attack. The attacker(s) in question utilized a flaw in the forum software to force users to inadvertently create topics which were nothing more than spam. The more sinister part of the attack was when links were passed to our admins which, without the admins consent, deleted topics from the forum. Unfortunately I caught this too late and the topics which were lost will be lost forever.

Fortunately, I do know who is behind this and they have been dealt with. Furthermore, the flaw in the forums has since been patched and all of the spam topics have been deleted. I would like to thank our administrators for their quick reaction, without them this could have been much worse.

I hope to go over all the applications this weekend and make some final rulings on them. Good luck to everyone who applied!

In other news, the forums got a dramatic speed improvement the other day. You should notice it doesn’t take 10 days to load a page anymore!

Update
If your application has been deleted, or is locked you have been declined. I appreciate all the time put into the applications though.

Update 2
Obviously the admins have not been chosen yet. I will schedule a meeting this weekend and we will go over it.