So you guys may have noticed that a few members (including myself) have changed their avatars and signature to a pixel art walrus and the word CodeWalrus. As some have already figured out, these were hints at a new programming group started by Juju, aeTIos, DJ Omnimaga, me and pimath (although he withdrew temporarily and is currently not part of our staff).

I would like to clear things up regarding what CodeWalrus is and what it's not. We are a programming group, that is, a hangout for friends to drive projects together, a label to release our stuff under and a home for said projects to live once they are completed. We do not intend to start a community nor replace Omnimaga or Cemetech as some would fear. A schism in the community is the last thing we want, as we all love the calc programming community as it is currently, and it would make us sad if it was somehow destroyed. The members that were recruited during beta aren't drawn away as they are still as active on Omnimaga and Cemetech.

I also want to clear accusations of stealing code/software to build the site. While it's true that we use a similar forum setup to Omnimaga, all the software we use was not made by the Omnimaga team, except for OmnomIRC whose license allow us to use it freely (besides, Sorunome explicitely allowed us to use it) and the recent posts SMF mod for which we got explicit permission from cooliojazz. Our theme looks similar in layout because it's based on the same default SMF theme as Eeems used for Omni. The smileys are from DJ's backups from when he owned the site, so I don't think there should be a problem with that. If I forgot something here feel free to mention it and I'll give an explanation.

Lastly, we have nothing to do with the Dear Omnimaga petition from a few weeks ago. While we did sign it, the idea to start CodeWalrus dates all the way back from June and we bought the domain in late October.

An effort is undergoing to keep things friendly with the Omnimaga staff, even though it's kind of stalled for now.

Now that the drama material is taken care of, I'm pleased to announce that our group is opening for the public to see on new year, with a few secret projects to discover. These will be cross posted to other sites at the authors' discretion. We already recruited a few members who contributed their creations to the group.

I hope you guys understand that we are not attacking anyone.

Looking forward to January 1st, 2015, and remember the day the walrus started to fly !

Heh, we wanted to make you wait longer with that elaborate publicity stunt, but the last thing we want is to make people believe we're gonna split from Omnimaga and try to replace it while it's definitely not the case. It's just a new site for a new programming group and we'll want to collaborate with Omnimaga. So yeah, it'll launch to the general public on New Year once we built the website correctly with all the features we want and we thoroughly beta tested it. And you can't really steal what is open source lol.

So far only walruses have posted in this topic. Can we get opinions from other members too?

So far only walruses have posted in this topic. Can we get opinions from other members too?

I'm a cat in a walrus suit. Does that count?

Well said, (Street)Walrus

So CodeWalrus isn't meant to become an other calculator comunity, it's mainly just a group of people programming projects together?

So CodeWalrus isn't meant to become an other calculator comunity, it's mainly just a group of people programming projects together?

Well, technically it would be a third calculator site, because there are two calculator sub-forums and currently all featured project sub-forums are calc projects. It's just that the initial userbase that was let in is almost completely within the same friend circle and the site policies and views are different than Omni and Cemetech (much like Omni has different policies and views than Cemetech).

It's also closer to a programming team than a community news site. It's pretty much dormant from 8 PM to 12 AM, though, because only 3 of the active members who have Internet access at home live in North America. This is why I often performed site-breaking maintenance and testing around those times <.< >.>.


EDIT: Also Streetwalrus, a little correction: The domain name was actually bought on November 3rd, not in October. Back in October, the site name was still undecided (although only 1 name idea didn't involve walruses).

Bump to remind you that the site opens on January 1st at 12:00am UTC (7pm GMT-5, 1am GMT+1 for you other timezone folks). At this time, all the accounts will be approved and registrations will be open to everyone.

I also remind you that it's not intended as a replacement to Omnimaga or anything else (more like a complement, and we're willing to work with the admins on this), neither we're quitting Omni or hate anything (that's silly), we didn't stole anything either (it just happens we use mostly the same software as Omnimaga) and this is not related to previous petitions at all. The admins there are very friendly (well, you guys know you can't go wrong with me xD), but common sense obviously applies.

Visit us at http://codewalr.us/ and have fun!