Please Read Office Outlaw Changelog

[Zwielicht]

March 4, 2026

• The "Bans & Notices" section has just been changed to "Banned Members".
• As such, we've also removed the automatic threads that are created when notices are issued. After trying this out, we realized that this in particular might be humiliating to existing members, which we don't want to do.
• Any existing notice threads have been soft deleted.
• There was an older suggestion by @Rem about whether or not mentoring is allowed here. We've come to a conclusion on this, which you can read more about here. The TOS and Trading Post rules have now been updated on this matter as well.
• Rule 2.12 has been added to the TOS.

2.12 Mentoring
Situations where a member wants to spend time teaching another member a skill or method are only permitted so long as it is not transactional. Paid mentoring services are not permitted on Office Outlaw.

 

[Zwielicht]

March 5 2026

There's a new prefix in all of The Saloon sections. It's called "Offbeat News".

Members tend to discuss politics here, and we wanted a way to categorise that without adding a "Politics" prefix. After all, we don't necessarily want to encourage just those specific discussions, but we do want to encourage members to share news in general. The Offbeat News prefix is general enough to capture all of those news-based discussions in a way that also conveys that it's not "SEO news" or "IM news" to those who are interested in those on-topic discussions.

We've also added prefixes to the Cryptocurrency section: Crypto News, Stablecoins, Altcoins, and NFTs. We'll be categorising existing threads through the day, but yeah, we finally have prefixes in that section.

Up next, we've added an "Algorithm Update" prefix to the SEO Discussions section. This isn't just for Google, but for any search engine that updates it's algorithm. There's also an SEO Tools prefix, this way you SEO guys don't need to use the Tools at the Forge section as a dumping ground for SEO Tools

Today's update is part of a larger one where we're going to reorganise the prefix feature across the forum and update subforums that don't have any prefixes.

 

[Zwielicht]

March 5 2026 Part 2

Okay, I wanted to do more of a quality of life update with the prefix feature, so here it is.

• The entire prefix feature has been alphabetized. This should make far more pleasant to select prefixes and easier to search for the ones you're looking for.
• The word for the Notice prefix has been changed to "Bulletin". We use "Notice" for the warnings system here so I figured this would be less confusing.
• The "Under Consideration" and "Under Investigation" prefixes have been changed to "Pending" and "Assessing" respectively in the Forum Feedback section.
• The SEO Tools prefix is now in the Tools At The Forge section. Any discussions on tools should go in this section.

As a member, there's nothing you need to remember with these changes. It's just meant to make it easier to use the forum. It also makes it easier for me to create, find, and update prefixes.

 

[Zwielicht]

March 6, 2026

There are just a few new prefixes today.

• "Managers" and "Co-Workers" prefixes in "Work Life"
• "Privacy" and "Security" prefixes in the "Privacy & Security" section.
• "Biz Ideas", "Biz News, and "Taxes" has been added to the Business section.

 

[Zwielicht]

March 11 2026

By the suggestion of @1974Mustang, we’ve implemented a change in how we handle bans for Platinum or Founding Members. Now, hopefully we never have to ban a member from either of those groups again, but should it occur, the Founding or Platinum badge will be removed from their account. This currently only applied to 2 former Founding members.

 

[Zwielicht]

March 12, 2026

Just a minor change today, but the "Closed" prefix in the giveaways section has been renamed to "Closed Giveaway" to make it clearer.

 

[Zwielicht]

March 14, 2026

After a suggestion thread by @1974Mustang and after reviewing other feedback and reports about the discussion of a certain other forum, we've created a new subforum that won't appear in the homepage feed.

You can read the quote below for more information, but we're going to try this out first to see how it goes. All past, current, and future discussions on the topics of online communities will now be moved to the new Online Communities section.

We've been discussing this, and there's something we want to try first.

So, after looking the existing threads over, merging the threads into a mega thread would create a messy discussion that's hard to follow.

What we're going to do instead is create a new subforum called "Online Communities". The reason we're doing this is because we can set it so that threads from this section don't appear on the homepage.

The following prefixes will be moved to that new subforum:

• Forums
• Chat Apps
• Discord
• Image Boards

Existing threads on all of those topics will be moved to the new subforum.

Doing things this way should allow members to continue having the freedom to post and also prevent these threads from cluttering the homepage and becoming more overbearing. Additionally, whilst I don't have a problem with the discussion of other communities, you could argue that it's for the best that these discussions don't appear on the homepage feed. It is just unfortunate that Discord and chat app threads won't appear on the homepage, but it's the best we can do for now.

We'll see how this goes as it's not a big deal to reverse this decision at a later date.

Update: Some adjustments have been made to the Online Communities section.

• Polls have now been enabled
• Threads from this section do not come up under "Latest Posts"

 

[Zwielicht]

March 15, 2026

Profile Privacy Update
By the suggestion of @1974Mustang and as voted on by the community, members can now set their profiles so that nobody can view it. Alternatively, you can set it to people you follow only.

This is undoing something we originally implemented last year by the request of @Rem.

Thread Highlights & Newsletter
Saloon threads will no longer be featured in the newsletter or highlighted.

@Avenger informed us that the highlights site guide was outdated. When I wrote this site guide up, the original highlights feature could only be used on individual posts. It was only in October 2025 that we updated it so that we could highlight entire threads.

Unfortunately, this meant that the site guide became outdated and members became confused on when a thread could be highlighted. This content update should answer that question now.

Thread highlights are typically only applied to threads that are featured in the newsletter. However, if enough members either submit a support ticket or send in a report requesting for a thread to be highlighted, our moderators may highlight the thread at their discretion.

New Reaction
By the suggestion of @Octavia and as voted on by the community, there's a new reaction available called "Eww". It uses the nauseated face emoji. This was added in as a suggestion by @Octavia was bumped today and received more than the required upvotes.

Karma Adjustment
By the suggestion of @t2van, adding attachments no longer costs Karma. Whilst the Karma system should have some sinks, in this regard, I agreed with what @shattered world said about this potentially discouraging sharing. https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/adding-images-karma.3580/post-42237