Another year, another heavily delayed annual recap!

This year was a real special one - we celebrated our half decade anniversary. Never in my wildest imagination did I ever think we would get to this size, for this long, and I continue to be humbled on a daily basis by the kindness and generosity our amazing members have to offer each other.

As always, here are some fun statistics from the year of 2020:

Skill Surf:

• In 2020, we had 157,079 unique players from 148 different countries.
• We had 46.58 years of play time on surf this year, that's a lot of dedication!
• The player with the most time in 2020 had a whopping 1,369 hours!
• We currently have 836 maps in rotation throughout all of our servers, this is up 94 since last year when I made the year in review post.
• In 2020, we had a ton of new personal bests! This includes 88,246 bonus completions, 302,242 map completions, and 2,405,797 stage...

New content from the past month through today, enjoy!

Surf

• Added new maps:
  • surf_8bit (T2)
  • surf_arcade (T2)
  • surf_boy_fixed (T2)
  • surf_clujreek (T3)
  • surf_gudrun (T3)
  • surf_het (T1)
  • surf_lockdown (T2)
  • surf_lovhon (T2)
  • surf_minigolf (T3)
• Took care of time reports

KZ

• Added new global maps:
  • kz_armored_core (T5)
  • kz_bluu (T4)
  • kz_cranking_the_hog (T1)
  • kz_itz_transcendent (T3)
  • kz_mandelbrot (T4)
  • kz_neoncity_z (T6)
  • kz_northkorean_censorship (T4)
  • kz_procrastination (T6)
  • kz_slide_concrete (T4)
  • kz_slide_rawr_xdeee (T7)
  • kz_sp1_katakana (T5)
  • kz_surf_ace (T3)
  • kz_drunkards_mental_patch -> kz_drunkards_mental_patch_v2
  • kz_bhop_monster_jam -> kz_bhop_monsterjam
  • kz_darkfury -> kz_dark_fury

Bhop

• Added new maps:
  • bhop_bram_halloween
  • bhop_enlightened2
  • bhop_future_city
  • bhop_hellish_dream
  • bhop_lade_v2
  • bhop_mall...

Hey all, I hope you have been enjoying the new year thus far and have been staying healthy and safe. A little recap of this past month's updates:

Surf:

• Added new maps:
  • surf_fiellu (T2)
  • surf_limbo (T4)
  • surf_polonia (T5)
  • surf_runner (T1, also available on Beginner Surf)
  • surf_tendies (T1)
  • surf_treasurehunt_go (T1)
• Significantly lowered triggers on surf_corner stage 3 and stage 6
• Fixed Bonus 2 of surf_lt_omnific_fix not registering times

KZ:

• Added new Global maps:
  • kz_alfama (T2)
  • kz_anotherclimbmap (T4)
  • kz_antiquity (T2)
  • kz_ashen (T2)
  • kz_betapmaps (T4)
  • kz_bhop_monster_jam (T2)
  • kz_bigcastle (T3)
  • kz_bridge17_fix (T2)
  • kz_byrem (T3)
  • kz_darkfury (T1)
  • kz_divided (T4)
  • kz_dontjump (T4)
  • kz_drunkards_mental_patch (T6)
  • kz_erbajerb (T2)
  • kz_eudora (T4)
  • kz_gary (T2)
  • kz_kiwi_cod (T6)
  • kz_loathe (T4)
  • kz_lovely (T5)
  • kz_luv_less (T4)
  • kz_pendulum (T6)...

Quite a few updates/changes have happened web-side, so it was worthy of its own update post!

• Fixed intermittent 52X Cloudflare errors
• Improved page speed loading in certain scenarios
• Improved web security (TLS 1.2+ enforced)
• DB server stability issues around the 18th have been resolved - our host has identified the issue and dealt with it accordingly. I have been looking into high-availability options to mitigate possible downtime in the future, although there is not a 'one solution fits all' answer for us.
• Improved backup-time performance

The website has seen a significant upgrade, Xenforo has released a very nice feature update, I will share the highlights (along with some changes I have made):

• Added GIPHY support
  
  
  
  
• Improved anti-spam measures
• New, customizable rich text editor
• Saved drafts increased to 7 day...

Before we start off, I want to wish everyone a very happy new year! I hope this year brings you great joy, and success in all that you do.

That being said, I want to apologize for being a bit behind on the web updates. Content additions (mainly maps) are mainly announced as they happen in our Discord, however I like to do more of a monthly wrap-up here to really get down to the nitty gritty with what has been changed/fixed/added/etc, which I was a bit behind on, so this will be a large one.

Reminder: This is a fruit roll-up of updates since the last update post.

Surf

• Added new maps:
  • surf_amaranthine (Tier 3) (Thanks Kuiq)
  • surf_crackdesert_evo2 (Tier 2)
  • surf_easy1 (Tier 1)
  • surf_easy2 (Tier 1)
  • surf_ebony (Tier 2)
  • surf_frey_remake (Tier 2)
  • surf_in_space_go (Tier 2)
  • surf_leesriize (Tier 2)
  • surf_lianfora (Tier 1)
  • surf_revolution (Tier 4)
  • surf_salvia (Tier 3) (Thanks...

chilly added a new event:

Christmas Movie Night!

Hello Sneaks Community!

The events team has decided to host another movie! We hosted a poll last week and the result of the poll was Home Alone!

• Home Alone: December 23rd from 9PM EST to 11PM EST roughly.
  

Click to expand...

Read more about this event...

sneaK added a new event:

DUELDOG Winter Classic

Our friends at DUELDOG are hosting a 1v1 event on Saturday, December 5th from 7-9pm ET.

It is a ladder system where you accumulate points by playing and winning matches.

Prizes:
1st - $100
2nd - $50
3rd - $25

Anyone who plays at least one match is automatically entered into their skin giveaway and eligible to win (~$40 value).

Also, if you refer a friend to DUELDOG between now and the tournament, you get a 3x chance to win the skin. Make sure to...

Click to expand...

Read more about this event...

sneaK added a new event:

Extra Life 24hr Charity Stream - November 14th-15th

Hey guys, as many of you already know on November 14th & 15th I am hosting a live charity stream over on my Twitch channel to raise money for children's hospitals around the continent. Our goal is to raise $1000 this year, with a stretch goal of $1500. There are several donation prizes & incentives, and special events scheduled throughout the 2 days.

Stream Times:
Nov. 14th: 10:00am - 10:00pm EST
Nov. 15th: 8:00am - 8:00pm EST...

Click to expand...

Read more about this event...

Happy Friday all,

Ending off Anniversary Week, I wanted to let everyone know what I have been considering/working on for some time. With the entirety of our servers being based out of Chicago, we don't quite fully cover the US with ideal pings for everyone, and this has been a consistent, but growing point of feedback from players. Chicago is "central", but our west coast players can see some high pings, depending on location, while east coast generally sees good/acceptable pings. We get quite a few west coast players and have had quite the consistent uptick in players (reaching capacity every night), so I am happy to announce that we will be expanding to the West Coast within the next 3 months!

What does this mean?
Much of this announcement has been in the works for quite some time, mostly in terms of infrastructure/database changes to ensure we have proper capacity for considerably more data and players. Once the west coast servers are in and...