Please Read The Official Changelog

[Zwielicht]

May 28, 2025

Just a simple update for today.

• We've been working on updating our registration filters to keep out spam bot and malicious users. Now that our forum is growing and attracting more users, we have noticed an increase in spam bots trying to sign up. We've also had a couple of people try signing up with known usernames on the other forum, although it's been easy enough for our staff to tell if they're the real users.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 29, 2025

We've been taking it easy in terms of updates lately, but we've still got a few updates for you today.

• We did another update to our registration filters to keep out spam bots and shiesty people using temp e-mails to register. Really, in all my years of doing this, I've never seen someone with good intentions using a temp e-mail service to register on a forum.
• I made a small adjustment to the sidebar. It might be a little redundant, but the consolidated forum menu sidebar now appears on the forum list page. This is just so the sidebar is consistent across the forum.
• The online status icon now shows for 2 hours instead of 1 hour. I know many of us keep the forum open in other tabs whilst we work on other things, so increasing the timer made sense to let others know that we're still around.
• The online status icon's shape has been changed from the default person icon to a circle with a dot in the middle. I thought it kind of looks a bit like a bullseye, which suits the forum's loose western theme better. I've also changed the colour of it to be the same green used around the rest of the forum.
• The requirements to send start a DM have been increased to requiring a single star and a 2 day old account. Previously, we just required a 2 day old account, although I remember @Festinger Vault mentioned feeling like this wasn't enough to deter inbox spammers who would just wait it out.
• I've added a new trophy in called "2 Days, 1 Star" based on the inbox requirements. This also lets member know when they meet the requirements to send a DM!

 

[Zwielicht]

May 30, 2025

Yeah, I'm up late again. I think this might be the first time in a little while that I'm updating the forum at midnight.

Anyway, I'll need to update this changelog as the day progresses. This means any tags made after the first couple of points won't send any alerts, but it's easier on me to do it this way.

• We made a change to the star system that everyone will like. Stars are now awarded much more quickly, every 3 minutes for logged in users as opposed to every 30 minutes. This way, as the forum grows, the "realtime update" as it's called won't be running so often that it has a huge impact on our server performance.
• We did some debugging with the star system to make sure everything is working correctly (thank you @Word Wizard for assisting me with that!). This is actually why we started looking into the realtime update interval, but we also ended up finding a few other issues with the star system that we fixed. It was really only a couple of issues: one of the stars wouldn't turn silver when you hit the threshold and the other issue pertained to recallable stars if a member no longer met the trophy criteria. Both of these have been fixed.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 30, 2025 Again

Yeah, I know I posted one for today already, but this one deserves its own announcement.

• We've added in a more robust ignore feature. This allows you to personalise the entire forum by ignoring threads, tags, users, and even entire subforums you don't have an interest in. The best part? You can personalise the freaking homepage feeds finally! I know many of you in the community have asked for a personalised homepage feature on other forums, so I'm very happy to be able to add this feature in. Now, I've tested it as much as I could, and it seems to work quite well without interfering with any of the other functionality currently on the forum. Even still, if anyone notices any new issues, please let me know in the forum suggestions section. You can read more about the ignore feature in the site guide here.