Yessir, after a (very) long day of waiting, the server migration is complete – Zelda Universe and all of the sites on the server (such as Zelda Wiki.org) are back up and running almost fully. On the Wiki we’ve got a few known issues and we’re working to resolve the immediately. On ZU, the forums aren’t totally up yet – you’ll still get a database error – so I’ll update this post and the Facebook / Twitter pages when the forums are up and running again. UPDATE: The forums are now up and running!

Last month, we needed to put up a new poll, so we asked the fans of our Facebook page what the poll should be about, and they responded with the idea, “you should poll them on what the next poll should be about!” We did this, and now a winner has been decided.

With both a new Wii and DS Zelda game fast approaching, more and more relevant Zelda news is appearing, and as such we have decided to hold a contest amongst our Facebook fans to expand our page’s fan base (our Facebook page makes our Zelda news updates appear in the friends’ updates list).

Once we reach 3000 fans, a contest will be held on our Facebook page with several as-of-yet undecided Zelda-related prizes.

As most of you know, we have a ZU Facebook page, in which we do such things as ask members what the next poll should be, and random other Zelda-related stuff. Well, over the last couple of days we’ve been experimenting with announcing our newsposts on the page, and it’s been working out well so far. It’s not intrusive, since it just appears on your list of latest friend updates, and it’s bringing in a lot more comments than before from people who prefer commenting on Facebook.

After polling the denizens of our Facebook group on what our poll should be, we chose this poll about the next E3. Be sure to rock the vote and tell us your opinion!

The results to our previous poll show some interesting statistics -  it seems that Spirit Tracks has some fairly large support from ZU, and it also seems that quite a large number of us miss watching Thomas the Tank Engine! Hit the jump for the numerical poll results.

After much debate (read: none at all), ZU finally has an official Facebook page, as well as a soon to be often-updated Twitter account. The Twitter account will tweet out the latest Zelda news from ZU, as well as do anything else we feel like it should do. The Facebook page is just the portal to ZU on Facebook.

So what are you waiting for? Fan us, follow us – we’ll be keeping these pages and accounts up-to-date and shiny. You can find us at the two links below (links are also in the sidebar under the RSS feeds). Click, follow, and enjoy!

ZU on Facebook / ZU on Twitter

UPDATE: After seeing how Facebook Connect works for a day, we’re pulling it to look at other options. It’s very wonky and does not work as we expected or wanted – by a wide margin. It is, however, a useful feature, so we’re going to continue looking at it. Don’t be surprised if you see it pop up again.

A long time ago, I had big plans to set up OpenID across Zelda Universe, a system that would enable everybody to login to the main site with their forum account without the need to actually physically link the main site to the forums (as we did a long time ago, and this caused huge problems). That was, oh, about three years ago. And OpenID hasn’t come very far. We’ve got OpenID working on our wiki, Zelda Wiki.org, but that’s about it. But something else has come a long way: Facebook Connect, Facebook’s system for logging into other sites with your Facebook account.

Facebook has openly stated that Facebook Connect was a part of OpenID all along, which I assume means that if ZU adopts Facebook Connect early it could eventually mean ZU would be set for a more advanced OpenID setup – but for the meantime, it would mean that you could only login to the main site with a Facebook account, and not your ZU forum account. Currently you cannot login to the main site at all, so it’s a slight improvement over nothing, and ofers a potential way to link your forum account to your main site account so that the two are the same login.

Of course, you do not have to use Facebook Connect even if we install it. If you do not use it, your ZU forum account would remain the same, and if you ever wish to you can link your current forum account to Facebook at any time. If you do link your account to Facebook, certain things you do on ZU, both on the main site and forums, can be posted to your Facebook wall if you want – this both makes ZU a bit more social, and helps spread the word!

If you’re at all interested in this, please vote on the poll below. The poll closes on Saturday, which is when I’ll decide what to do.