Welcome Beta testers, welcome one and all.

You have been selected because you're the best of the applicants and we hope you'll live up to our expectations.


Make your way over to the forum to say hello and post any problems.

Public access to this site is possible, but the non-beta testers will not be able to stream, login or register.
Happy streaming.

-Stuart

Welcome Beta Testers!
If you have any difficulties, please join the forum and tell us about them!
More information and updates can be found in this thread: http://freecast.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=36#p36

Just a quick note, currently the maximum bitrate allowed is 56kbps.
If you use more than this you will be kicked from the server.

If you haven't already joined the forums, please do so, it's the easiest way to get in contact with you.
Thanks,
Andrew.

Project freecast has launched !

We've opened up the site to new registrants, so tell your friends to sign up and get freecasting.

The forums have been moved to http://forum.freecast.co.uk/, but don't worry, links to the old URL will be redirected to the new and all the old posts are still there. If you havn't registered, please do so and get talking.

If you have the know how you should come join us on IRC. It's very empty at the moment, if you come in and nobody talks please idle for as long as you can, it's often the case that as soon as you leave somebody else comes in, so nobody actually talks to anybody.

Enough rambling, enjoy the fresh faced freecast.

Thanks to both Sam_ and Calugarar who reported issues in connecting to the server, the situation has now been resolved. Anyone who received an "incorrect password" error when connecting need no longer worry.

There seem to have been quite a number of "incorrect password" errors since I informed everyone that we'd fixed them. Well, now we've fixed them. I think. If you have any issues relating to this please post in our form, we have a special thread for it here.

It has come to our attention that some users are circumventing certain safeguards we have in place to try and keep some kind of fairness when booking.

Now while users didn't specifically agree to any terms when signing up we assumed one account per person was too obvious a statement to even make.

Needless to say, some people have registered multiple times in order to book many slots in one go, something we're not happy about, and we will be unbooking any upcoming slots which stray over the 2 hour rule.

This is why we have added the option to delete your account under the user profile.

Users with multiple accounts will have afew days to decide which account they would like to keep and delete any others. If you still have multiple accounts by next week don't be surprised if you attempt to login and all your accounts are gone.

You have been warned !

[Multiple Accounts - forum thread]

Now, an nicer update. There was a little problem with newly registered users not getting any credits to start with until the sunday reset. We're not sure how long this has been a problem, but earlier we reset the number of credits for everybody to 3. So if you had used up your credits in the week they've been replenished.

Andrew is working on fixing it, and we're very sorry we didn't realise sooner.

[New account, no credit! - forum thread]

Just to say we hope you all have a good holiday, and to see all you DJs next year.

Maybe if you're good, you'll even get a present from us...

Some of you may have noticed a new addition to the site in the form of a paypal donation button.

Fear not, freecast hasn't suddenly become 'paycast', and you will still receive your credits as usual, but there is now the chance to get more!

In short Andrew and i have decided to trial a new idea as a community building exercise. Nothing builds a community like a little friendly competition ;)

The idea is this, at the end of every week, titles will be allocated to users who have participated or contributed to the freecast community in some way. We won't be able to implement all of these titles straight away, and these are in brackets, but the others are up for grabs as of right now.

They are as follows: (Expanded in the forum thread)

(Chat - User who has been in the IRC channel the most)
Donations - User who has donated the most
Forum - Most interesting thread started in the forum
(Rated - User who has increased their rating the most in the week)


The prize for each title currently stands at 3 credits. So winning one of these titles will effectively double your credits for the week. We're still undecided if a user can hold more than one title at the same time. We'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it.

Needless to say, Andrew and i cannot win.

Winners will have their DJ name placed and linked in a box on the main site, much like the 'Forum Posts' box. The credits will be placed in the winners accounts at Monday morning near 00:00GMT. Similarly the cut off point for the week will be Sunday night 23:59GMT.

Suggestions for new titles or feedback to the idea should be put in the forum thread. Hopefully this will get a little more general activity in the forum and the IRC channel. While we appreciate you reporting them, we do like to talk about things other than bugs!

Forum Thread

Freecast was offline for a few hours from at least 10am GMT to about 12pm GMT.

We're sorry for the outage, and we are aware the registration page seems to have broken as a result. We're working on fixing it, no eta as of yet.

If you encounter anymore problems please post them in the forum thread.

Update: Registration page has now been fixed

Forum Thread

For those of you that don't subscribe to our Monthly Newsletter I thought I'd keep you all updated on some changes.

More Slots - Every Freecast member now gets four slots every week, instead of three. Already this is filling up our booking page which is really good to see!

Different Day - After a survey on our registered members we have found that the vast majority of you guys wanted the slot reset moved to a Friday. So we did it, slot resets now happen on a friday!

Also, we're currently working on a new shoutbox / requests system for the DJs. If you have any ideas or suggestions please let us know in this thread

Forum Thread

Well, after about six months of running Freecast we have finally gotten around to getting ourselves a “Terms of Service”. It's a pretty standard ToS for web streaming sites; and agreement not to break the law and to obey our rules and so on and so forth.

This Terms of Service is just to cover us if someone abuses the service or someone decides to take legal action against us for whatever reason. This won’t change your Freecast experience in any way whatsoever, so don’t worry about that!

Anyway, this news post is just a warning to let you all know that tomorrow (Friday Morning GMT) you will be required to agree to the terms of service before you continue using Freecast. This will be done just through clicking a button and will be fairly obvious (you won't be able to do anything until you click the button) so don't worry about it.

Oh yeah, you can read the Terms of Service here.

PS: Users who register from now onwards don't need to worry about all this because they will agree to the ToS at registration.

Forum Thread

After much coding the DJ/Listener interface is ready for testing. Features include:

Shoutbox
Requestbox
Playing now track info
Show description
and Previously played track info

This new toy can be found here, at live.freecast.co.uk. We encourage DJs to test it out while they are doing their shows. Have listeners use it and try to break it (but not too hard!).

Please report any problems or suggestions for the system in the forum (preferable) or the IRC channel if there's a mod there to record it.

Enjoy!

P.S. Special thanks to kensei for his help on this :)

Forum Thread

That's right, the way freecast looks is going through a mini revamp.

Thanks very much to Flinty for our new logo, which looks much better than the one I 'designed' all those months ago.

Also we're trying out some google ads on the site, don't be surprised if the layout goes through some minor re-arranging this weekend. Everything will still be there, but hopefully it will look a little more organised.

Forum Thread

On September 7th freecast will be beta testing its birthday. That is to say we started beta testing on the 7th of September 2005. Doesn't time fly! We'd like to thank all our beta testers once again for their hard work helping us off the ground and every single person who has joined since. Anyway, on October 11thFreecast officially launched to the public and we'd like to hear your ideas as to to what we should do to celebrate our 1 year anniversary, so please get posting in our forum thread!

Congratulations to Jay and the Bounce Crew who are now the holder of the Most Users Listening record with a peak of 22 listeners.

The listener record is a new thing, as we only started logging listeners 3 days a go, but we're working out the details to automate it / give some form of credit rewards. So watch this space!

We're having some problems at the moment with the server, in short nobody can connect to it to stream. As far as I'm aware we didn't break anything, so we'll just to wait for wavestreaming to get back to us on the issue.

A note has been made of everybody who has booked slots over the next 7 days, and they will be refunded the appropriate number of credits at a later date. Any further bookings made from this point forward will not be eligible for refund.

Sometimes these things sort themselves out over time, so if you have booked do still try your slot at the assigned time and it may be working by then.

Hopefully everything will be back to normal soon.

Today our Shoutcast server was down for a good portion of the day. It's back now but we're looking in to what went wrong. In the mean time, we encourage anyone affected by the downtime to post your Freecast username in this thread (click the "Comments" link) and we'll refund your credits.

Thankyou and Sorry
The Freecast Team

If you read our newsletter you'll know that Freecast is on the look out for some staff members, if you don't read the newsletter then this news post is for you!

Basically we're looking for dedicated Freecast users to act as staff members. Tasks will involve
-Moderating the forum
-Answering technical queries in the IRC channel/the forum.
-A few other administration duties

And probably most importantly
-Being an active and friendly member of the forums and our IRC channel

Applicants should have well written English (like what we do), good netiquette and a familiarity with shoutcast servers. It should be noted that while we are not looking for a programmer or coder at this time these skills could come in handy in the future, so any coding experience should be brought to light. A second language would also be beneficial but not essential.

The hours we ask of you for the tasks listed above would be an hour or two per day, every few days.

As for the pay... let me put it this way, we don't get paid, unless you count the unlimited credits which we unfortunately have no time to use.

If you're interested leave a comment in the forum or email us at freecast@freecast.co.uk, including any URLs you may feel would help your application.

Note: I should note to people who have already applied that this doesn't mean we're not interested in you. We're just trying to give this as much publicity as possible, we're also buying some time while we get the control panels set up for you guys ;)

Well we've mentioned this in our monthly newsletter but I may as well put the link up here for those that don't read the newsletter. We're having a survey which can be filled in here: http://freecast.co.uk/survey/?s=5
Your views are important to us and what you say will effect how Freecast grows in the future, also we'll automatically add an extra credit to your account for completing it!

Thanks!

Happy New Year to all our users old and new!

A quick reminder to all users to broadcast at a maximum of 56kbps. If you go higher the server will disconnect you every minute and ruin your set.

The end of 2006 marks the first full calendar year for freecast. Here are some rough statistics for January to December 2006:

Overview:
Number of unique visitors for the year: 30,000
Number of pages served for the year: 490,000
Number of hits for the year: 845,000

Visitors:
Jan unique visitors: 1,544
Dec unique visitors: 3,145
Peaking in August at 3,576 where the server threw out a little over 50,000 pages.

Busy parts:
The most viewed page was the booking sheet and on average our busiest hour was 19:00GMT and the quietest 07:00GMT. There are no quiet days, but the busiest day was sunday. Thus making sunday at 19:00GMT the most desirable slot we have.

A huge thanks to our sponsors Wavestreaming for having faith in us from the beginning. Check them out if you fancy graduating from freecast onto your own internet radio station.

The freecast service has been experiencing some downtime lately. As a result any bookings made will not be able to connect to the server.

The full story as to why is here: http://forum.freecast.co.uk/viewtopic.php?id=609

The bottom line is, for the time being, project freecast is offline.

We're working on fixing it, updates will be posted here.

Just a quick note to any one put off by the news item below; after working with Wavestreaming to move Freecast to a new server Freecast is now back up and running as usual. Thanks to everyone that let us know about problems with the service.

Freecast has been entirely offline for the last two weeks. There was a change to the server on which the site is hosted which resulted in the domain (freecast.co.uk) trying to grab files from entirely the wrong place. Unfortunately we were not informed of the change to warn you in advance, and had to figure out what had gone wrong after it had already gone wrong. Not an ideal situation.

The good news is, it's all working again, and everything should be back to normal. Fingers crossed that was the only hiccup for 2008.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

First off, introductions: This is Dom C. here [binary1230 on the forums], I'll be helping out with some Freecast administration and coding.

Andrew and Stuart have recently allowed me to volunteer some of my time in order to help out with making Freecast even more awesome than it already is. I am very interested in all your experiences interacting with freecast and will be paying close attention to feedback. Also, with more of us keeping tabs on the site, we should be able to very effectively minimize any unforeseen downtime.

In the case of any emergency issues with the site (e.g. site is down, shoutcast server unresponsive) I encourage you to email me directly at binary1230@at@yahoo@d0t@com, and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Secondly, I would like to remind everyone that the use of duplicate accounts in order to gain more slots per week or book more than 2 slots in a row is forbidden under section 12.8 of the terms of service of this site. Anyone doing this without our explicit permission is subject to having all their accounts deleted and/or risking a site ban.

There are a few valid special cases where we do allow duplicate accounts, please email us if you believe your duplicate accounts should be allowed. Also see related (but older): [Multiple Accounts - forum thread] for more info on duplicate account policies.

I am currently working on some improved and automated methods of duplicate account detection that will be rolled out soon. You have been warned!

Beyond that, keep putting up your ideas/issues in the Bug Report and Improvements section of the forums, I'm always interested in feedback.

Here's to another great year at freecast!

-Dom

Greetings all, Dom here again and back so soon.

I've added (though, more like enabled) a new feature to the site: An embedded flash player for Freecast. If you click the new link on the left hand side that says 'Listen Now (Flash)' it will pull up wavestreaming's nifty flash player app. Feel free to link this player in to your site, just copy the link location or the HTML. I'll post more detailed instructions on how to do this soon, or if anyone wants to write a quick guide and post it on the forums that would be very helpful.

Let me know how that works for you!
-Dom

OK guys, I decided to try out a new java-based IRC client. I put this up in addition to the existing IRC stuff we already have, but check this out and let me know if you like it.

So check it out, let me know if you like it: http://freecast.co.uk/irc/beta/

We've had a couple of users report that they're having problems with their credits not being reset at the end of the week. We're checking this out now, but if you are having this issues, please just let us know in the comments section of this news post and we'll fix it up for your account individually until we track down the real problem. Thanks -Dom

If you've noticed lately the forums have been getting thrashed by some nasty spam. I've completed coding some basic countermeasures that should catch ~95% of it now, and will make it easy to flag down later. If you have any issues with it flagging your posts incorrectly, let me know.

Please give a round of applause for the users who stepped up to be moderators who stepped up to the plate in the war against bots.

Freecast is still alive and well and we're having a blast providing free shoutcast hosting for all. Thanks again to everyone that makes this site rock. Also thanks to wavestreaming.com for providing our shoutcast hosting.

Peace
-Dom

Us at Freecast are pleased to announce a new Admin of the site, which is me. I'm Terrum and I'm 17 years old, my Freecast profile is http://www.freecast.co.uk/show.php/Terrum

I, Terrum, will be helping Freecast more in the new 2010 to bring it back to business, and back in track so Freecast can be back to normal from its deadness! I will be on nearly 24/7 and am very swift and fast at responses.

If you need to contact me for any reason, Here are the best ways to contact me:
- Send me a PM on the forum, or start a new topic in the correct category!
- E-mail me at hlrules888@hotmail.com
- Add me to MSN with the same e-mail above.
- Use my live support service on my website at www.terrum.co.uk

Ask me anything, even if it is unrelated to Freecast.

But hope everyone has had fun on Freecast, because now Freecast is going to be extra fun with more listeners, DJers and a very active Admin!

Thanks all for reading and Happy casting,
Terrum.

Hi all, Thanks all for your patience and ability to support Freecast in favour.

We have finally found a solution for the Password bug and it's now fixed! There should now no longer be any problems connecting to the server. We hope you enjoy our newly revived Freecast! If any problems, Please don't hesitate to contact me (Terrum) or use the forums! My contact information is on the previous news post. Enjoy!

Thanks and Happy Casting,
Terrum.