Forums For All Chapters!

After several weeks of testing our site-level forums we've finally launched forums for all chapters! Check out your chapters to see if they have a forum yet. If not send a note to your founder requesting one. Here are a few of the many groups that already discovered the new feature and launched their own forum (membership in Chapter Founders has its privileges):

• Naked Apes of SilverMoon
• Crocodile Bungie
• Elite Enforcers Halo Lan
• Halo for Teens
• HALOID
• MPHS-BRTLTT Halo League
• Stop The Die
• W. Seattle Local #44

Biggest LAN Event Ever?

Wow! The Halo National Championship just passed 10,000 competitors! There's talk that this is the biggest LAN gaming event ever. We're going to call Mr. Guinness, you go sign up if you haven't already. Oh yeah, we've also got a nice little tournament-related treat coming your way, check back soon.

New Feature: Comics

We've added a new feature to bungie.net: Comics. There's not much there now, but check back often to watch them accumulate. You can reach them over on the right in the new Inside Bungie section.

Maintenance Complete

The datacenter network maintenance is complete, and all services are functioning normally at this time. We apologize for the downtime.

Bungie.net Down Saturday Night

Due to network maintenance happening in the datacenter where the bungie.net servers are located, all Bungie web services will be offline starting Saturday, at 11 PM PDT, until approximately 6 AM on Sunday morning . During this time, you'll probably either get no response or a brief error message if you try and access the site.

Seven Thousand Plus

We just passed 7,000 competitors in the Halo National Championship. (We're saving our fireworks for 7,777, of course.) This means the rate of signup is increasing. I'm going to shut up about this until we reach 10K, but one reminder: slots are filling fast, sign up today!

Six Thousand Plus

We now have more than 6,000 people registered for the Halo National Championship. We're going to buy some fireworks to shoot off when we reach the magical 7,000th competitor. At this rate that will be right about this time tomorrow afternoon.

Halo National Tourney Frenzy

Registration for the tournament is climbing! At the time of this news post the event had 4,956 competitors! Wow. We're so psyched we've added a counter over on the right showing the current total number of players. (Thanks to iGames for the data!) Also check out this page at the iGames site to see total competitors per location. The current leader: a whopping 344 entries at Kings Games in New York City.

Call For Themes

For those of you that have thought about submitting a theme for use on The Seventh Column we've just made things a little easier. At the bottom of the Seventh Column home page you'll find a permanent link in the sidebar for theme submissions. If you have some design skills and a small understanding of HTML, you now have no excuses.

Filthy Propaganda

Our current batch of Seventh Column propaganda was such a hit we've had requests for more. This time candyman has answered with a set of banners for Seventh Column chapter web sites and another suitable for affiliate sites.

New Halo Content This Week

Great new stuff for you this week on the Tru7h & Reconciliation site. First off we have four new screens for you to caption. Remember: try to be funny, not lame. Keep that in mind when you post. ;o) Second, we have the latest installment of our legendary walkthrough. There's some cool shots in there as well as some legendary tactics you may not have tried.

Tons of New Chapters

We had a busy weekend. I just approved about 30 new chapters. If you were having trouble finding one in your area go take another look.

Call In The Reserves

Swirlfire makes an excellent point below. The Halo National Tournament is going to be a huge event. We've partnered with iGames, a network of LAN shops, to help run things, but there's a very good chance the local shops involved aren't that familiar with Halo. This is the perfect opportunity for your Seventh Column chapter to do a good deed and to gain some publicity. If one of the centers hosting a qualifying round is in your neighborhood give them a call to see if they have things under control, and if you're up for it offer to help. This will not doubt be a great way to gain exposure for your chapter. Just make sure you negotiate with them before you commit so they agree to let you plaster the place with Seventh Column logos and flyers for your chapter during the event! Post to the Septagon forum to let me know how this goes, I'm pretty curious.

National Tournament Poll

How many of you are going to compete in the Halo National Tournament? Let us know in the new Bungie.net poll.

In old poll news almost half of you call it soda, a quarter more call it Coke, 1 out of 5 call it pop, and 1 out of 10 call it either a "cold drink", soda-pop, or simply cola.

New Halo Shirts!

We just got a new Halo shirt in stock in the Bungie Store. Well, it's actually an old shirt, the same black Halo shirt that we made for ourselves way back, the one you saw Joe and Jason wearing at last year's GameStock. You remember, your first glimpse at Halo actually being played? Of course you do. Anyway, enough people around here drooled all over these shirts that we decided to make them available to everyone. Get yours today!

Short Downtime

Update: We're back online. But you knew that.
We forgot to update one portion of the code when we launched forums yesterday. We're going to go ahead and update now. The server will be offline for a short time, no more than 10 minutes or so. See you soon. Sorry for the trouble.

Scheduled Downtime

Update: We're back online. See the top story above to get the scoop on our newest and greatest feature, forums!
As Achronos said yesterday, all of the Bungie web sites except the Bungie Store will be offline for about 2 hours starting at 10:30 am PDT today for a planned upgrade.

All Bungie Web Services Offline

[This sentence has been censored by order of the Bungie Tru7h Commission.] Unfortunately, such godly acts require much preparation, and as such, all Bungie web sites will be offline for an extended period of time on Wednesday. Downtime is not expected to be more than two hours, and will start about 10:30 AM PDT.

"New" Bungie Sightings Doo

While reading through the Bungie.org forums I came across a post from Miguel and noticed in his sig that he has actually updated the Bungie Sightings page! For a time this page was the place to go for community related information and I'm glad to see activity on it again. The site sports a stylish un-design and a new partner in crime, mnemesis. It's even got a handy listing of the Bungie.net rants and top stories. Nice!

New Screenshots Need Captions

There are four new shots up in the Caption This! database. I've also fixed it so that when you rate a caption you're no longer returned to the first page.

Halo T-shirt Resupply

It looks like the Bungie Store just received a huge shipment of Halo T-shirts. This is by far our most popular shirt, and was completely sold out for a bit. Pick yours up now while we have them in stock!

The Myth Vault Forums

Update: Achronos has informed me that the Myth Vault Forums will not be coming back. The traffic there died out months ago, so there is not much of a need for them any longer, especially with the spiffy new bungie.net forum system.

-Big Bad Biker Momma

I know this isn't used much, but the server running the Myth Vault open source development forum is offline. It is being worked on, but I have no ETA. So, in case you were wondering, that's why you can't get to the Myth Vault forum.