Hello everyone!

I wanted to take an opportunity to reach out to the community and let you all know what's going on behind the scenes here at BF4DB, as well as give you an idea of what we're currently working on and what you can expect. This may get rather lengthy, so grab your fidget spinners and Mountain Dew before proceeding.

Server Patch R59 is something that's been heavily discussed since it's release a few days ago. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, a new patch was released by DICE that was designed to do a few things. Firstly, it has patched the glitches that the hackers were using to crash servers. However, they've also patched the various commands that were used by the BF4DB plugin to combat hackers on servers running as Official. So what does that mean for you? You'll no longer be able to "screen", if you will, hackers from your Official server. We're going to be switching our servers from Official to Ranked, and we recommend you do the same. While you won't have those joining from Quick Join, you'll be able to remove hackers before they get into the game. It's understadable why DICE did this, but it doesn't help our mission against hackers. As always, we need to adapt, and adapt we shall do.

Speaking of plugins, we've been working hard on our plugin as well. Version 2.0.3 is currently being tested by those in our Clan Rep program.  This new version significantly improves performance, reduces CPU load, and still kicks the shit out of hackers on Ranked servers. This version will remain in closed Beta, but if there are no issues from testing, will be released to the public on August 4th. It is HIGHLY recommended that you update to the new version for improved performance. It also reduces the load on our server. We will eventually put in a measure that will force all previous version to 2.0.3 to upgrade. Trust me, you want this latest version and not the old one. It plays nicer and works on Linux too.

We have started working through our Issue Tracker, fixing bugs and issues around the website and Forums that were reported. There aren't too many, and many of them are backend fixes, but you should notice a few improvements as they're done. Also, we are in the process of optimizing EVERYTHING, from the website, to the plugin. This will reduce our network usage, reducing our monthly overhead, and reducing MXT's sheer anger when the website loads a little bit slowly. The optimization should speed things up significantly.

Just to give you all an idea of how much "stuff" has been going on at BF4DB since we launched just about three months ago, I'm going to use some numbers. If numbers make your head hurt, skip to the next paragraph. In the three months, we've logged an amazing 1.3 MILLION battle reports from over 800,000 players that have been downloaded at some point by someone. Of all of those, we have currently 8.300 active bans. And lastly, we have nearly 900 registered users on the website. These are awesome numbers, and we're so excited to have you here with us, even if you're a scumbag hacker trolling our website for funsies.

Because of all of the data we've been amassing over just the last few months, we've moved to dedicated hardware to split the resources and help keep our costs down. Thank you for coming to our site and patronizing it. Without all of you, our website would be nothing more than empty pages. Thank you for your continued support of BF4DB, it means a lot to all of us!