It's been fun, but without a game to bring new members to the forums, along with the no ability to ban anyone from the forums, they were decaying quite rapidly and it was time to end the torture :)

In the never ending saga of us managing to find horrible hosting companies, our irc server has been down for the past few weeks.

We finally have it going again, and it can be reached at irc.procat.dk (or at 217.195.184.104 untill the dns changes carry over)

For the 5 of you that will be excited by this, i'll prolly just be telling you on msn/aim anyway :)

Irc has been having issues for the last couple of days. Instead of irc.procat.dk try using irc.eu.procat.dk. #earthandbeyond as usual.

Ya gotta admit that was an awesome picture.

Normal service has resumed.

irc.us.procat.dk #earthandbeyond for celebrations.

Penny Arcade has been running an annual charity for kids. It is called Child’s Play (click the link to get there). So please, go there, check it out and if you think you can part with a few bucks choose a charity and buy the kids something from the lists or donate money through PayPal or email. For the price of a movie ticket, you can make a less fortunate kid happy when they need it the most.

That’s all.

Thanks.

Sunset is upon us, and the final 24 hours of Earth & Beyond have begun. Enjoy them, and post your experiences and memories here.

A big personal thank you to all you guys for making EBPortal what it was, and to Cerdith, Niobe, Arcturus, Kohiba and Rainre for being great to work with.

Why not come join us in IRC for the final day? irc.portalive.com #earthandbeyond in your favourite IRC client, or use our Java Client.

Update By M: Cerdith and Niobe stopped by our IRC room to inform us that the servers will remain up untill 10am Pacific tomorrow. (That's a 16 hr reprieve if my math is right)

I've been thinking about ways in which to cover the closing of the game, and one idea has been holding some closing parties/events around the world. The Fan Gathering in London was a great success, and I see no reason why somebody from each city that has a number of E&B players can't organise a get together.

I'll certainly try to hold something in London, and perhaps we can webcam them all up. I'll be opening up a forum specifically for this purpose over the weekend, so people can post their areas and organise events.

The month of April saw an unfortunate fall in approval ratings of Electronic Arts' CEO, Larry Probst. February and March had seen 82% and 81% approval ratings, respectively. However, after a post notifying the E&B community about a Forbes CEO approval poll, the angry E&B brigade caused him to plummet to a 19% approval rating, placing him in the bottom of the pile of CEOs rated by Forbes votes.

Voting for May has opened. It is unknown how much value shareholders place in such ratings, but it does show how upset E&B players are.

Disciples of Rebellion is organising an Arena tournament on the Andromeda Galaxy. The tournament is open to all level 135+ players, there is no entry fee required to join in.

The prizes are:

1st place - 1 Billion Credits
2nd place - 500 million Credits
3rd place - 250 million Credits

For more information, or to join, please go to tournament section on our forums.

A date for the tournament will be announced on the aforementioned forums.

After some extreme flakiness to our current US IRC Server, I've decided to move the IRC server to a new ISP. DNS updates for irc.portalive.com should have already been made, but for those that haven't you can connect via 216.126.81.157. Our EU server is still available via irc.eu.portalive.com. See you on there!

After an overwhelming response via email, PM and even one phone call, I've decided to keep EBPortal open until the September 22nd deadline. I had no idea that people felt so passionately. After that, EBPortal will be transformed into a memorial site for E&B. To be perfectly honest, if another group did take over the E&B reigns, I would prefer to keep EBPortal as a memory of what was. I'm going to take a 'backseat', so to speak, with regards to handling the forum moderation, etc, but I am going to use EBPortal as a testbed for some new forum systems I want to try out, so hopefully I'll be able to make your experience here a little better.

After dedicating more than two fun-filled years to this site and the Earth & Beyond community, I have decided to call it a day and close EBPortal.

As I was recently reminded, this is a hobby site. Hobbies should be fun, and hobbyists should receive enjoyment from them. To be blunt, I'm burnt out from running the site; it is making far too many demands on me and it has become more of a chore than a fun, enjoyable hobby.

I have really enjoyed the last two years, and I've made a lot of new friends out of this site. The developers are cool guys too, especially Cerdith and Niobe. I'll always consider them to be some very cool people to work with.

The site will be available for the next three weeks for you to grab anything you want from it. After that, it will be removed. I have no wish to sell it, or pass on the reign to someone else. EBPortal has always been my baby, and I do not think it would be fair to let someone else run it exclusively.

Remember, it was the community that made EBPortal what it was. I believe EBPortal was as big as it was because it was run and frequented by fans, and not some corporate affair to make a profit.

Goodbye, and maybe I'll see you in another game...

Dave "Albino Eatpod" Starling
Founder
Earth & Beyond Portal

After a long flight to the US and several hours of negotiations, I'm pleased to announce that Electronic Arts has sold the rights to Earth & Beyond, its source code and assets to EBPortal for an undisclosed sum.

Also included in the purchase was all server hardware which will be moved to a new data-centre. It is my intention to move one server to Europe to allow the spread of the game internationally.

As part of the new "Portalive Studios" brand, several ex-Electronic Arts team members will be involved in the move. Sadly, Cerdith and Niobe will not be moving as they're firmly set in place in the UXO design team.

I'll be making an announcement about the full development team later today. Watch this space for more developments...

After posting most of the documents and images from the Earth & Beyond Storyline Package that Cerdith sent me, I've now placed the whole lot of up for download: it's around 24MB. Cerdith says she still has a few documents to send me, so I'll post them once I receive them. Enjoy!