SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

The site conversion to new software will occur this weekend. At the moment we are anticipating a 2-3 day outage starting early Saturday morning. You all should be aware of the following changes/occurances with the new software:

• 1. All of you that use a different login name than display name (i.e. the name you use to login in with is not the same as the name that people see on the forums) will no longer be able to do so. The new software uses only one name, so we will be taking everyone’s display names as your universal username.
• 2. As has been posted now for 3 weeks, you can only have 100 total PMs in your in and out boxes when we do the site conversion, so any of you with more than that will have everything but your latest 100 PMs deleted. We do have an issue on the import that will sometimes add PMs you’ve sent to your sent folder if the other person has them still in their inbox even if you previously deleted them. This may make you go over your allotted limit when you first log in, so please clean up those boxes once you get in so we don’t have to do it.
• 3. Avatars that are over 20k in size will not be ported over to the new forums. That’s a very generous file size and if your avatar is over that and you want to keep it, you can edit your image in just about any graphics program.
• 4. Our limit on the new system is 80x80pixels for avatars. On this software we only allowed 48x48, so you are getting more space. Those users with avatars over 80x80 will not be imported. On the current software large pictures are resized down, so you may not even realize you are on the list. Please check it, it was posted last week and can be found in the Shrapnel General forum.
• 5. The new software will have an infraction system which will help take away some of the manual work the moderators and administrators currently have to do. Please make sure you look over the infraction system carefully so you know what the rules are (rules have been updated) and the penalties for breaking them.

If I think of anything else everyone needs to know before the conversion, I will update this list.

Thank you,
Mindi

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

In other words:
Last call for changing your display name!

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

Does infraction system mean uncaring robot overlord?

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

Well, in that case - This is what I'm using everywhere else.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

I vote Xintis for uncaring robot overlord.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

I'll be changing my icon to something else http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

there... I found one on The Avatar Emporium

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

...Don't you mean insane robot overlord?

/me seconds.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

Of course I check back in for the first time in months just in time to see that I have to use a different login name. Typical. XD

Your software took my login name as my login name, not my display name. :(

I am scared of changes anyway to make the forums look sand colored again?

Change the tint on your monitor :)

You weren't narf poit chez BOOM before?

I was. I changed my display name to 'Narf_the_Mouse' before the forum change. :)

Agreed, it is a huge change. Click over to our home page and on a couple of the product pages, and you should be able to better understand the new theme.

Why would you want the _ ? imho it takes away from the name

Is this going to be the color for the forum? Not bad color scheme. Nice forums though. :) Really cool and long long long over due.

The color change is standardization of the site.
The fairly new blue logo of Shrapnel, the main website, and now the forums which are blended into the whole thing (including the URL being changed to ShrapnelGames instead of ShrapnelCommunity).

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

I hadn't even noticed that till you said something :O

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Would it be possible to add a choice of skins/themes to the do-do list for the stodgy old curmudgeons among us?

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Unfortunately my work filter blocks the ShrapnelGames domain and not the ShrapnelCommunity. No more browsing the intel forums during the work day. :(

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

kwok, google up a proxy browser and show that corporate filter who's boss

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

I'll give it a shot tomorrow. Anyone have a favourite they'd recommend?

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

vBulletin: Great stuff.
What not to do (Mass Effect forums)

P.S.: Could use a custom favorites icon.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

AngleWyrm, talking about the one in the URL? Yeah, I need to create a new one, it's vb default (obviously). I'll make sure that's on my list.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

Oh and Captain Kwok, Richard's workplace has also blocked a bunch of stuff......anything with the name game in it.....sites such as youtube.....even sites such as jibjab, etc. Definitely makes it harder for him to do anything for the site from work, even on his lunch hour/breaks.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

Um...Isn't Richards' job at Shrapnel?

Or am I missing something here?

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

No.....Richard has a full time job as a Supervisor at a fortune 20 company. This is and has always been his second/side job. When he started out here he was doing the contractor hop, lol.....you know where you take a contract for 6 months to a couple of years and then go elsewhere. That was very lucrative during the 90's and early 2000's and gave him lots of flexibility(read: no one cared what you did from work as long as you got your work done)..but once the market seemed to be busting in that area we had him take a permanent job instead of being a contractor.

His hours at his job as he's went up the ladder have increased, especially after he got into the management track....it's one of the reasons we made the decision to step down from our official positions with Shrapnel. In an average week he's working 50 hours a week plus he has an hour commute both ways because we live in nowhere land...i.e. no IT jobs in the town of Lancaster, Ohio. We expect he will probably be a Manager in the next year or so at which time his free time will probably go further downhill. Eventually we want to sell our house and move closer to his work so we can cut down that 2 hours per day community time, but between his full time job and the restrictions at his job he/we really don't have the ability to work on Shrapnel the way we once did, much less work on anything else that we have interests in and have quality time together.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

It's too bad he can't work part of his time at home, Mindi. That's why I'm able to spend as much time on the boards as I do-I'm chained to a desk for 10 hours a day, but I can do what I like on the internet, since I'm at home. In 10 years time, 20 at the most, I think we'll be seeing a shift to atleast 80% of desk jobs being worked at home, if only for the savings on gas. Every time gas goes up in price, I effectively get a raise :)

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

He works from home on occasion but as a manager of people, he is the one who A. has to set the example and expectations for his team and B. he has to make sure his team is getting things done. Normally he works from home if he's been up half the night on an SRT (Service Restoration Team---as management when there's a bad outage he has to coordinate the restoration effort to get service restored) or he's just exhausted and wants to get stuff done for work without so many people coming to him and bugging him while he's at work. Plus, I doubt anytime soon his company is going to let folks with any kind of regularity work from home...big time corporate America is pretty behind the times in that regard because they want to guarantee they are getting their money's worth out of you.

And yes 2 tanks of gas a week at 60 bucks a pop adds up.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

I created a new one from our blue logo and uploaded it. Sometimes it takes a little while for browsers to start using the new one though so it might not show for you right away.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

That will help.

Im always thrown off by the title in the URLs and bookmarks for here also. Intel Forums. I know that its a war-game theme and meant to refer to gathering intelligence, but my old computer background still sees it as the chip maker. Having the Shrapnel logo on each one will help.

Re: SITE CONVERSION THIS WEEKEND!!!
 

One solution would be to set the shrapnelcommunity.com domain up as a virtual host mapped to the same file system location as shrapnelgames.com, rather than a redirection. By doing this, the server will then actually serve the pages from both domains, and people behind vicious firewalls can browse away. Granted, I'm not sure if vbulletin uses relative urls everywhere, or if it uses a domain variable to prefix them, so this may or may not work properly.

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I've been using a proxy to drop by during the workday. It works ok, but does mean a few extra steps overall. :P

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shrapnelcommunity.com will go away eventually so that's not an option.

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Isn't that just inviting spam registrars? There are all sorts of broken links to the domain, and some spider is going to snatch it up...

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We'll have it for some time but the plan is to fix the broken links with 301's so the search engine's over the next few months resolve to the new url.

shrapnelcommunity.com was never meant to be a long term solution anyway, it was just a short term solution to a problem with the way our sites were layed out.

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Don't let go of shrapnelcommunity.com, in fact hang on it it as it had what, PR 5 with google. That's very hard to come by and makes the domain itself very valuable. Using a 301 redirect will transfer all that page rank to you over the span of 3-12 months (it was a very large forum).

I don't know how you're redirecting it right now (hopefully 301 with it in a different folder). Don't point it directly here yet. Infact, you might want to throw up a mass-302 redirect (moved temporarily) so google doesn't strip you of page rank for broken links and just update it with 301 redirects as you go.

By the way, if you want to have clean URL's (which search engines goes nuts for) all you need to do is add this to your .htaccess file. (oh, hypes act as joiners to the search engine allowing stuff like "our games" to be treated as a signal phrase and not two words). By implmenting this, you won't be able to browse your site offline and you'll need to tweak image paths but it's worth it.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^Our-Games$ /Our_Games/Our_Games.html

You might want to also add.

rewritecond %{http_host} ^shrapnelgames.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.shrapnelgames.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

as the major search engines treat www.domain.com seperate from domain.com