Today the US Federal Trade Commission decided that bloggers, celebrities, and other media outlets must disclose any payments in cash or in-kind material compensation that they accept from companies in exchange for product reviews or endorsements; payments in this case are not limited to cash, but anything of value, up to and including the product itself. This is the first time since 1980 that they have updated the document entitled Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

The Icrontic editorial inbox lit up today with concerned readers and friends asking how this affects us. The short answer is–it doesn’t. In the first place, we have never accepted (or actually even been offered) cash to review a product. It is, however, implied that we have received the actual product in order to review it–after all, we can’t exactly review something unless we have it in our hands.

Sometimes companies demand things be sent back to them. This is common with expensive hardware or with certain large game publishers, for example. We get the product, review it, and send it back at their expense. We don’t get to keep the product, but we do get the exposure and traffic from having reviewed it. Sometimes, of course, we do get to keep the items involved. There is, however, only so much you can do with a box of review heatsinks or piles of review cases; most of the time we collect it all up and give them away as door prizes at events such as Expo Icrontic. Occasionally we get use out of review hardware. For example, the HTPC setup at IcronticHQ is made up of hardware given to us by AMD. Our media room and guest areas are full of Sumo bags that we’ve gotten as review samples. In exchange, they get exposure and headlines from the reviews and other content we generate from those goods. (more…)

I took the show on the road with me as I prepared to travel to Chicago. Fortunately, an old college friend let me crash at his place. Unfortunately, I had to deal with his lust for the camera. His annoyances would hardly stop me from talking about the upcoming Icrontic Oktoberfest, which is sure be to the best ever. Also, a quick recap of the events of Icrontic goes Renaissance. The big news this week was NVIDIA’s unveiling of Fermi, as well as AMD talking up their open source physics system dubbed Bullet Physics. Get to it!

It’s Labor Day TF2 time! Get your game on and give a high five to Jimmy (TiberiusLazarus) for the super-neato server config work.

What the deuce? It’s freezing in Northern Indiana today! No matter, there’s business to attend to, such as the Icrontic Camping Trip in Iowa, the proper way to enjoy tequilla, the Xbox 360 price drop, and the upcoming 1.50 patch for the aged Battlefield 2 (you’ll find it’s like a fine wine or scotch whiskey; it grows better with age).

Also, I am looking for feedback from YOU, dear viewers. Visit this discussion and spill your guts, let me know what you love about Mind, what you hate about Mind, and anything else you mind about Mind (if you don’t mind).

What do you guys think of the Ticker? Do you read it on the home page or from the forum discussions? Do you like being able to see the first few comments on the home page?

Saying the Icrontic Expo starts June 24 and ends June 28 is an innocent lie. Many Icrontic regulars arrive early, and the international travelers typically stay late. For me, Expo is a 3+ week endeavor that leaves behind the deliriously tired, sputtering nutcase that’s writing this post.

After 6 years, it feels like we almost know what we’re doing.  Never ever has the setup gone so smoothly, the tournaments gone so well, and the balance of activities been so sublime.

Eric Ryder spent many weekends preparing Icrontic HQ, adding a huge amount of electrical and network infrastructure over last year’s already significant setup. Quinton Healy diagrammed and refined a new table layout to allow more people to fit in the same amount of space (and more comfortably). When the tent arrived, the tables and cables fell into place like clockwork thanks to their outstanding planning. Sixty computers, and zero circuits tripped in the tent. Wow.

Andrew Conrad and Bryan Miller ran the Left 4 Dead, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Team Fortress 2 tournaments, all of which were spectacular successes. They stayed cool under pressure, and resolved some bugs we ran into early on in TF2. People are still talking about how great that event turned out.

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They came from all over, and so it began: Icrontic Expo 2009. We’re expecting our first batch of arrivals today, so let’s talk shop. Please join the EPIC2009 Flickr group to share all your photos. On Twitter, use the #epic2009 hashtag so we can follow it all. If you post videos to Vimeo or YouTube, please link them up here.

Final reminders for our intrepid travellers: please double-check the “what to bring” list, don’t park in the driveway after unloading, and don’t set up your computer in the tent until you get the greenlight from Ryder or Quinton. High-fives abound for this year’s event staff: Ryder, Q, Magic, Cyclonite, CB, and fatcat. They all deserve an extra hug when you get here. Thanks as well to our awesome sponsors: OCZ, EA, Futuremark, Thrustmaster, ATI, and Duck (yes, the duct tape folks!)

T-shirts and polos are printing, name badges are ordered, tent and port-a-potty are scheduled for Wednesday, the garage is re-arranged for boardgaming, the basement and kids’ room are cleared for sleeping. Every night the gathering at Icrontic HQ gets a little bit bigger. Now, we wait.

Read the fine print!

When Icrontic first started to do video content, we needed a place to host it. We didn’t really want to use YouTube because of various restrictions on quality, and the craptastic “mentality-of-a-12-year-old” userbase. We opted for Vimeo because the quality was superb and the embedding options were nice. The availability of HD content pretty much sealed the deal.

We started off our relationship with Vimeo in a gentle way: we posted up a video of a reviewer submerging a Gelid fan in water and we posted a short clip of a funny exchange over beers in the kitchen of ICHQ. Everything was peachy.

Before we went to E3, I jumped in and paid for a premium account because I knew we would need Vimeo to be a part of our toolbox; I thought I had all my bases covered.

Until the fateful day of the Nintendo press conference…

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Hello dear friends and savvy readers!

We know that you — unlike our illustrious editor in chief who wielded an embarrassingly primitive facsimile of a mobile for vastly too long — probably have a smartphone! You probably even use it to hop on the 3G information super slowway and browse the web.

We’ve decided to do our part to help the mobile internet suck a whole bunch less, so now you can point your crippled mobile browser towards http://mippin.com/icrontic to enjoy Icrontic’s content on the go.

You can thank us later.

The Icrontic Shop is now open for business. It currently features classy Icrontic polos and our Oktoberfest pint glasses.

If you buy a polo, you’ll be tagged as an “Icrontic Sponsor” for 1 year, which means no sidebar ads while you’re logged in. If you’d like to pick yours up at the Expo (no shipping!) be sure to order by Sunday, June 14 so we have time to get them made.

Polo shirts will only be on sale for the month of June, and there won’t be any extras or additional runs this year. Thanks for your support, we appreciate it!

There are five tickets or two weeks left, whichever comes first. If you’re thinking about coming, it’s time to decide.

Last week, hackers destroyed Avsim, a community of flight simulator enthusiasts since 1996. Thirteen years of mods, skins, and terrains were deleted when both the website server and their backup server were compromised. They’ve since set up a temporary site and started salvaging what they can from the Wayback Machine and elsewhere, but much work is likely forever lost.

When I read this story, I felt a pit in my stomach. In 2003, Icrontic was brought to its knees in similar fashion. Though our community has existed since August 2000, our archives only stretch back to May of 2003. In the aftermath of our server being compromised, those who then ran the site discovered to their horror that the “backups” were in fact storing the wrong database.

Tens of thousands of forum posts and our collective community history was obliterated with the database and entire file structure. Our custom CMS was toast – no one even knew how to recreate the table structure, let alone get it running again. The resulting saga stretched on for years until our community was made whole again under the Icrontic name in 2007.

It’s constantly wounding to see “15 posts” under the name of an old member like Darksword, who was a super-moderator with thousands of posts before the 2003 crash. The start of our Folding@Home team, the record of our first-in-the-world 3DMark team, all of our favorite old-school articles – gone forever. All we have now from that era are memories of what was.

As you can imagine, Brian and I pay special attention to our backup strategy.

Every night, our database is backed up to a second server (much like Avsim was). However, that’s just the start. We manually download a copy of the database frequently. We manually back up the entire file structure (images, code, downloads, videos, etc) every few months. We periodically burn a copy of the database to DVD and lock it in a fire safe.

To irreparably damage Icrontic, you would need to compromise both of our servers, steal or destroy 2 computers at ICHQ, and break open my safe. And even if you did all that, we’ve already proven that our community is more than data.

Data loss is a hard lesson. We were lucky enough to survive our trial by fire and are stronger for it. We wish the best to the Avsim community and hope they come back kicking.