PLEASE READ RE: Site Conversion

[Mindi]

Okay so the site is up but not yet perfected. We decided we would rather get the site up for users and continue working on the tweaks than have the site perfect on launch but down for several more days. I would hope most of you would agree with this statement. HOWEVER, this means you need to have patience while we continue to make these changes that are yet to be done.

Because we are busy doing these changes, I’m going to require everyone to post any issues they are having in the Shrapnel General forum (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14 )and not in each individual game forum. If you start a thread in an individual game forum the moderators have been instructed to move it and I will not be addressing anything left in the game forum, so if you want to be heard, post in the designated forum.


The PM issue (PMs reappearing that you previously deleted) was announced last week in the Site Conversion threads, so this should have been no surprise, but I will copy and paste what I said last week here to remind everyone.


The following are a list of answers to questions we are getting several times so rather than address those individually, 5 times over, here are those answers:


PMs: 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.


Also as previously stated, we may up the limits for PMs after things settle down on the new board; however, any of you who are hoping for a ridiculously high limit of 1000 per person will be greatly disappointed. You may think that those numbers are reasonable but I can assure you that most users were well under that number and that you are the ones in the severe minority if you need that much space. There’s this great feature underneath your PMs to allow you to download your PMs into a file format and if your PMs are that far out of control, I suggest you take advantage of that new feature. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CLICK THE PMs YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD, IT WILL DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE FILE INCLUDING IN AND SENT BOXES.


COLORS: Any problems you have with colors or site design you can take up with Tim, he is the one who designed the new site. Many of you may not realize that we rolled out a new blue logo a few years ago to be more encompassing of our games that are not wargame related, that is the foundation of the color change.

SITE DESIGN: As far as site design goes, the basic structure of the forums have only had two changes: colors and fixed width. I’ve already covered the colors above, fixed width has been done in order to make the whole site seem more like a cohesive unit versus previously where the forums almost seemed separate from our main pages. You will notice we are also using the same URL as the main site versus the old www.shrapnelcommunity.com. The rest of the forums are exactly the same in construct: header/banners at the top and a side bar for press releases/links/etc so I don’t see where anyone should be complaining about those elements.


EDITING: Editing on the old board use to have a cap of 6 hours and eventually it became broken in the software allowing the users to edit without cap limits as some of you have realized, this has been fixed with the new board software and has been restricted to 30 minutes. There are various moderation reasons to do this, for one we have people who get into arguments and then go back and edit and act like they didn’t say the things they did.


Another reason for the cap is so if you get angry and leave over some disagreement with another user, you cannot edit out useful comment that you had contributed to the community. In particular this happened with one user in the Dom 3 community and frankly that kind of behavior is extremely childish, but because some people act that way when they get angry we have to have some sort of stop in place to prevent one user from harming the community at large.


We've heard this may be a problem in MP game threads. We are going to examine our options before making any decisions.


LINKS: We have a tool that we want run that we hope will help redirect links that are broken that point to the old board. It’s a server intensive tool though and we have no guarantee it will work correctly so we have left that to do until this weekend when there are less users online.

SEARCH: Search is probably not working completely correct yet as we have to rebuild the search table. This also is a server intensive tool so we have left it until this weekend for the reasons stated above.

FORUM RULES: Please read the forum rules section, it has been updated and you should all be aware of that fact. Also an infraction system is installed which allows moderators to give infraction points or warnings in some cases. Once you receive a certain amount of infraction points, the software will automatically give you the first ‘time out’ of 24 hours and so on depending on your infraction points. Some infraction points expire, others don’t so please be aware of the changes.

UBB CODE: This is not functioning right now, it will be re-enabled soon.


As we continue to have questions I MAY update these posts, but again all conversation concerning the site conversion so be going on in the Shrapnel General forum. Since I covered concerns above, I would like to point out some of the great new features:


SOCIAL GROUPS: You can create a social group and allow/invite users to join! This should be great for MP games because you can have your own area where users can show pictures and have a running dialogue that is separate from the main forum. Make sure to check it out!


PICTURE ALBUMS: You can now upload picture and create different albums to share those pictures in. Once you’ve done so, those albums can be accessible from both your profile and the All Albums button at the top of the forum.

USER CP: The usercp is much more robust on the new forum software, please make sure to check it out, especially the edit options tab which will allow you to change many things in the forum to your own preferences. This includes options such as auto subscribe to threads you have posted in, date and time formatting and basic, standard or expanded editor.


BLOG: Our blog has been integrated with our forums, so you will now find our blog is attached to the staff member that created the blog. In the future this may be changing, but that is the current set up. You can sign up for an individual staff member blog by adding it as a subscription.

ARCADE: The arcade now has the ability to do tournaments and users with the highest score will notice that listed near their avatars. We hope to add more games once things settle down.


THANKS: You now have the ability to thank a person for a post by clicking the thanks button at the bottom right hand corner of the post. No, you can’t thank yourself. :P


REPUTATION: You have so many points of reputation you can award other users per day. Use the scale at the top of a post to award reputation points.

We have other additional features coming in the next couple weeks, one of which I expect to be very popular. Like I said previously, please be patient while things are tweaked and features are added.

[Edi]

Can we kindly set the autologoff for the forums to two hours or something like that or make it a user editable variable?

Right now it is an absolute goddamn pain in the ***, because I can't be active all the time and if I had to go do something while editing a post to update links etc etc, it will far too easily cause lots of work to be lost.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by Edi

Can we kindly set the autologoff for the forums to two hours or something like that or make it a user editable variable?

Right now it is an absolute goddamn pain in the ***, because I can't be active all the time and if I had to go do something while editing a post to update links etc etc, it will far too easily cause lots of work to be lost.

I will look into the auto logout. We had a thing on the old board to only keep your session open for an hour, but it didn't actually log you out. This software works differently so I will see what setting needs to be tweaked.

[llamabeast]

The restriction on editing is likely to cause many problems. In particular in the Dominions 3 forum (which is the only one I frequent):

- The mod list is maintained by a non-moderator. Since he will no longer be able to edit it it will quickly fall out of date.
- The strategy index is maintained by a non-moderator. Same problem.
- Any time a mod or map is updated, it's essential to update the first post with information on the latest version. Otherwise there will be much confusion.

These are two of the community's most valuable resources, to the extent that I would argue that breaking them would alone be an unacceptable cost as far as the Dominions forum is concerned.

Finally, as I believe you've already heard, the ability to edit the first post for an MP game is crucial to the way they're run.

I presume similar issues apply to the other forums.

I understand your concern about people being sneaky in changing what they said during arguments, and deleting helpful posts. While these issues are certainly regrettable, I would argue that they pale into insignificance compared to the usefulness of editing to a wide variety of community efforts.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

The restriction on editing is likely to cause many problems. In particular in the Dominions 3 forum (which is the only one I frequent):

- The mod list is maintained by a non-moderator. Since he will no longer be able to edit it it will quickly fall out of date.
- The strategy index is maintained by a non-moderator. Same problem.
- Any time a mod or map is updated, it's essential to update the first post with information on the latest version. Otherwise there will be much confusion.

These are two of the community's most valuable resources, to the extent that I would argue that breaking them would alone be an unacceptable cost as far as the Dominions forum is concerned.

Finally, as I believe you've already heard, the ability to edit the first post for an MP game is crucial to the way they're run.

I presume similar issues apply to the other forums.

I understand your concern about people being sneaky in changing what they said during arguments, and deleting helpful posts. While these issues are certainly regrettable, I would argue that they pale into insignificance compared to the usefulness of editing to a wide variety of community efforts.

As stated above: We've heard this may be a problem in MP game threads. We are going to examine our options before making any decisions.

PATIENCE. This conversion has been done by 4 people many of whom are going on little sleep to get things up and going for users to be able to post again. Also, I would disagree with your last statement and the proof is in how many people notified me that they wanted content back that the user who left deleted on his exit. We have to weigh different options and see if there is something different we can do. All of that takes a little time and right now I'm working from a priorty standpoint which means basic functionality that is broken comes first.

[llamabeast]

Okay. Sorry. Cry for patience heard and understood. I will go and do some actual work or something.

[Azselendor]

I noticed signature graphics are disabled now. I didn't see a work around unless I use that tantalizing image button above where I'm typing for all my posts

Next thing I noticed is the use of PNG images on the site, but not PNG behavior fix for Internet Explorer users (IE6 is the new Netscape4). I'll be happy to PM one to you or Tim if needed.

[Mindi]

Originally Posted by Azselendor

I noticed signature graphics are disabled now. I didn't see a work around unless I use that tantalizing image button above where I'm typing for all my posts

I think this is fixed now. If you could verify, that would be great.

[Mindi]

Signature graphics, on my list now.

I'll try getting a message to Tim about the PNG issue.

[Tim Brooks]

Azselendor, please do PM me. thank you.