Now that <Holiday Name Here> is all over and everyone has recovered, it's time to get back to mapping! ThinkingWithPortals is offering a $50 gift card to NewEgg.com as a prize for the January Mapping contest. This month's theme is visual appeal in the Aperture Laboratories test chambers - the best looking map will be our winner.

Check out the contest rules thread for details!

Update! By request, we are going to extend the date of the contest by an extra week. The contest now ends February 10th, so hopefully we will get more submissions!

I want to wish everyone a Happy <Holiday Name Here> from all of the staff here at ThinkingWithPortals. We've had a really good couple of months with maps and other community content, and we all look forward to the day when the Source SDK base is released and we can all begin writing full mods using the Portal technology. Until then, everyone have a safe holiday season.

It looks like the server is temporarily having some mail problems, and no emails are getting sent out. We're working to get this resolved as quickly as we can.

In the meantime, if you just signed up and you haven't gotten your welcome letter, email the administrator email (click the Register button again and it will show you). Also, if you haven't gotten PM notifications recently, that's why also.

We'll let you know when we're back up and operational.

EDIT, 2:48am
Everything should be back to normal now. We've tried to resend any mails that didn't get sent out previously, but any that haven't been delivered in the past day or so are lost forever. Sorry for the problems, should be the last of their kind for a while we hope!

Congradulations to MrCow for winning the November Mapping Contest with his map, cpm_wccmap (a/k/a Untitled). Check out the release thread here for a download, and keep your eye on the Reviews page as all of the contest maps are sure to be reviewed soon!

For those of you who hate the thought of downloading yet another program onto your computer and hesitate to install mIRC or XChat, we've just added an IRC applet for everyone to use.

http://www.thinking.withportals.com/irc/

Hop on and come chat with us, ask question about mapping, or watch GLaDOS go crazy when you try to keep her company

Quote:
msleeper: Oh, yeah. Ai. I'm pretty sure that only started happening after i added glados to the final challenge where we pretended we were going to kill me.

msleeper: Fuck yeah! We are number 1 on a friday and saturday night, find a vacant parking lot, and park my car there and sit in it alone, all to make my parents think i have to login as glados and manually remove the signatures of people who fuck up.

msleeper: The device has been telling you rational sentences.

Korjagun: All subjects intending to handle high-energy gamma-leaking portal technology must be informed that they may be vital to your success. We are throwing a party in honor of your vital organs to the left of the test.

Erm, right GLaDOS. Whatever you say.