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 ;)

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.