Latest changes to the forum & its features

['thul]

more than a day or so after a rollback, it stops being worth restoring to find the lost posts.

[Mervi]

I've just installed the latest security update and upgraded a few plugins as well.

I think my message on the things that are new/changed since early April disappeared as well. From the top of my head I remember telling that the changes weren't as big template-wise as I expected (so you shouldn't really see any new wonky things) but there were a few minor problems (the wiki tagging stopped working) that I need to look into and a few new features like

- a mobile version of the forum that is offered when you visit on a mobile device (you can choose to use the desktop version)

- user tagging (twitter-like, just add @ in front of a user name- THIS SENDS A NOTIFICATION TO THAT USER (a pm, and if they've enabled emails about pms, also an email) so please use it sparingly. Make sure there are no spaces, so @Mervi works while @ Mervi doesn't. Unfortunately if the username contains a space, tagging them doesn't work at the moment. If someone bothers you with these, you can either edit your pm/email settings and/or contact an admin.

- a couple of new spam prevention methods that you shouldn't really have to worry about once you've completed registration (these had been deactivated which explains the recent flood of spam. I'm still not sure if that was due to the server glitch as well or if there's been something more sinister going on)

I also started an archive that was lost and updated the user titles list... gone as well. *sigh*

Can't think of anything else right now.

//ETA
Oh, I also deleted the mytwitter thingy from profiles (that used to display your latest tweet). It had stopped working and wasn't being updated. There is still an option to display a link to your twitter account tho.

['thul]

Did you happen to remove the signature system in the process of doing a few changes? these beings cannot find it any longer.

[Mervi]

Noted. There still seem to be some database issues (on the admin side of things, haven't run into anything here) that could be the root cause.

[Mervi]

Rrrright!

- signatures are back! I won't even go into what I had to do to fix it lol You have to have a few posts under your belt before you can add your own, though. If you're an old user and yours still doesn't seem to work, go to user cp > your profile > change signature. Check that the signature looks like you want it to (there's a preview), check the "enable my signature in all of my existing posts" and click "update signature"!

- I've disabled the mobile theme. Its development seems to have stopped and tbh in my experience it wasn't that much better than what we have anyway. But please tell me if you missed it, I never got any feedback for it.

- I've cleaned out some old threads to a room called archives - they're still open for new replies, but I thought it would be less confusing for new folks visiting this room if they don't have to wade through 6 years of "oh this plugin seems to have stopped working".

- Some of the Read These First posts have been cleaned up a bit

- custom user titles are here! If you don't like the post count based honorary fitz-names, you can change it to whatever you want.

- still to do: try to figure out why the wiki links have stopped working

If there are any old (or new) features that you miss, leave a shout!

[Mervi]

The wiki tag is back!

Well, unfortunately it's not the same one, I think there's some security/incompatibility issues with the old code, but I found an alternative. Now you can use

Code:

[wp] elderlings [/wp]

to get elderlings and the link that is created goes to plentywiki and searches for results. In a way this is even better than the last one where you had to know the name of the article you wanted to link to and get it 100% for it to work. Pity about the old code in the discussions though, it's not pretty.

[Mervi]

I've just upgraded the software to the latest version and fixed a problem that had caused errors when people tried to register new accounts. I thought it had been suspiciously quiet in the new members department!
The same fix also finally let me adjust the custom profile fields that I've tried to do so long, so now in your "edit profile" the (voluntary) sex/gender field is a free text instead of a dropdown selection. Any previously entered selection is still there, but now you can freely identify however you prefer.

[KekPafrany]

I tried out the free text field, it's working well.


Can we have a "bee" smiley?

[Mervi]

Sure!

Code:

:bee: / last smiley in the box

[KekPafrany]

Sure!

Code:

:bee: / last smiley in the box

Awwww, thank you