Please Read The Official Changelog

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Every forum needs a changelog! This thread will act as the official changelog for Office Outlaw.

There were some changes made when this forum was started on November 10, 2024. I'll share these changes here in this opening post.

• The various subforums and structure have been created.
• A couple of site guides have been added to the site guides section.
• A user title ladder has been created. It's post count-based.

Index

• November 24, 2024 Updates
• November 25, 2024 Updates

 

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November 24, 2024 Updates​

I've made several updates to the forum today. I'm pretty happy to finally be making progress with developing this forum.

• The avatars, by default, are circular. I've reduced the radius of the avatars to make them more square with rounded edges.
• The default pixel-based values for the forum and widths are biw percentage-based values. This is important as not everyone has the same monitor size, and it's ideal for the viewing experience to be consistent for everyone.
• I've removed the "social shares" sidebar widget. I've always just found these to be a tad silly to have on small websites. Besides, there are already share buttons over each post by default, so having a general share widget felt redundant.
• I've started adjusting the colour palette. I want to work on the dark theme first. Preferably, I want it to be the only theme as maintaining two themes is too much work. A light theme can be created later on if there's any demand for it from the community. Ithink I'll still with this alexandrite type of colour scheme for now.
• I've disabled the "angry" and "haha" reactions. The "sad" reaction might seem a little negative, so I've removed that as well. The corpos are sort of right about "negative" reaction causing issues in communities. On the other forum, just the "haha" reaction is enabled for whatever reason, and it's often used sarcastically. The "like" reaction is +1, the "love" reaction is +2, the "wow" reaction is +1.
• Username changes are no longer displayed publicly.
• I've limited the number of subforums to just the ones I consider to be essential. There were too many to start.

 

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November 25, 2024 Updates​

• Usergroups now have badges! These still need to be customised in terms of colour (along with usernames), but at least the badges are there now.
• Usergroups now have different coloured usernames. Administrators are white, Moderators are red, VIPs are light blue, Donors are orange, and registered members are green. I made my own special usergroup a gradient, which I'll consider doing to other usergroups in the future.

 

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March 17, 2025 Updates

It's been a little while since I've last worked on this forum. I was planning on working on it more in mid-2025, but my sudden termination on "that other forum" means that I now have more time to start working on this again.

• New subforum nodes have been added. These new subforums are geared toward internet marketing.
• The warnings system has been updated. One problem with "the other forum" is they were too strict with everything, and calling everything a "warning" was always off-putting to members. Warnings here are re-worded so that they're called "notices" instead.
• A mission statement page is being worked on and will be posted shortly.

 

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March 23, 2025 Updates

We’ve got some great new updates for Office Outlaw today!

• We have 3 new user upgrades available: donor, VIP, and trader
• We have started working on creating a marketplace, which is called “The Trading Post” since we apparently have an Old West theme going on.
• Some new sub forums have been added and others have been changed to fit the forum’s theme. Do let me know if any of the subforum names are confusing by posting a thread in this section.
• A ‘Founding Member’ user level has been created. This is a special group for those who encouraged me to start Office Outlaw and have helped grow this community. This user level is not available to purchase, and will be locked once this forum grows more.
• I added all of the reactions back. I thought it over and believe I found a way to keep people from abusing them by changing how many points each one adds to someone’s reaction score.
• The Mission Statement is now completely finished!

We’re going to have someone on our team update the forum style so that this forum doesn’t look like the Joker made it. Yes, I’m bashing myself here.

I’m also still looking into adding a star rating system that displays stars on profiles for users. This might require custom development, but it is something I very much want to add in at some point. If anyone knows of a plugin that already does this or one I can easily modify to do this, you know where to post it.

 

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March 24, 2025 Updates

The main update today is that e-mails no longer go to spam. This issue was sorted out by @Apricot, so nobody should need to check their spam folder for e-mails now.

 

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March 25, 2025 Updates

• For the contact details on profiles, we've added Discord in, removed Skype, and changed 'X' to 'X (Twitter)'.
• The styling of the "Settings" header in the account page has been fixed (https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/header-block-missing-settings.43/)
• The sidebar of the main page has been tweaked to prevent it getting squished at smaller resolutions (https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/home-page-side-bar-squished.41/)
• 'Mission Statement' moved from Forums to the help page and is now displayed in the footer of the site.
• Multi-quote enabled.
• An alternate light theme has been added to the style options. There may be issues with the design, so please let us know if there is any text that is unreadable.
• Google Analytics has been set up, finally!
• @Impulse made an entire light theme for Office Outlaw. @Rem helped beta test and develop it. Thank you to both of you for doing that!

I'll update this as the day goes on.

 

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March 26 2025 Updates

Okay, today is going to be another busy day! @Impulse is going to be focusing on making adjustments to the light theme with help from @Rem. I'm going to be focusing on establishing some new rules for the community around selling, along with writing some guides as I want to add to this community as a member as well.

I'll update this post as the day goes on.

• Linkedin has been added as a contact detail option on profiles.
• Posts can now only be edited for 10 minutes.
• A donations page has been created. You can find it in the footer.
• Adjustments have been made to the light theme to make it more readable.
• You'll notice that some stats are now viewable in the message block: join date, message score, and reaction score.
• The light theme has been improved (hopefully)
• A giveaways section has been added. I'll be starting this off with my own giveaway threads.
• Tagging has been enabled across the board, so you can now add tags to your threads.
• Cookie consent has been enabled for legal reasons (GDPR, ugh...)

 

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March 27 2025 Updates

It's been a bit of a slow day today. Even still, we'll be posting updates as we go along.

• We got more logo concepts back for the final logo, so we're moving forward with this.
• Reactions have been enabled in post lists. I'm still figuring out how to add a counter to the display.
• I've updated the PHP version to 8.4. No compatibility issues were detected, but please let me know if anyone notices anything.
• Reactions have been disabled in The Trading Post sections. We all remember how that feature got abused by sellers on that other forum, so let's nip that one in the bud now.
• A new custom reaction has been added in called "HolyFuck". Use it for when something is really, really funny.

 

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March 28, 2025 Updates

This might be a slow day in terms of updates. Even still, moving this forum forward is a priority, so as the day goes on, expect more updates to be added to this list.

• The minimum character count for usernames has been changed from 3 to 2. So, if you've been thinking about signing up as @AA or @BB, now's your chance!
• Administrators no longer show up in the leaderboards.
• As suggested by @Spy, we now have a downloads section.
• The dark theme's background has been changed from pitch black to a very slightly purple black.
• The maximum message count has been increased from 10k to 15k. I got annoyed because I wrote a 2k word thread and hit the character limit, so I increased it. If this isn't enough still, please open a feedback thread.
• User upgrades have been temporarily disabled whilst we work out what our permanent pricing will be.

 

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March 29, 2025

I'm a little unwell today, but we're still going to be updating the forum as much as we can.

• The much-requested star system is now live! You can read more about it here.
• Since the star system works based off of trophy points, we've added in new trophies.
• A favicon was created and added to the site.
• Fixed the padding of the stars.
• The Giveaways section has been renamed to Giveaways & Discounts.
• The "Home" button on the navigation bar was removed because it was redundant; "Forums" is the homepage.
• We're looking into moving the sidebar to the left instead of the right. The add-on we found works for this, but then everything looks kind of squished. We should be able to edit the code of the add-on to fix this issue, though. If we manage to fix it, we'll enable it tomorrow. Update: instead of using an outdated add-on, we just coded it ourselves, so the sidebar is now on the left.

Tomorrow, we'll be looking into displaying the sidebar across the forum. Right now, it's only viewable in the forum list.

 

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March 30, 2025

Okay, back to building up this forum with all of you!

As usual, I'll update this changelog as the day goes on.

• All of the e-mail issues have been fixed. Thank you to @Apricot for handling this.
• A PPC subforum has been added with prefixes for specific networks to start it off.
• An e-commerce section has been added. Thank you to @UnusualSubstance for suggesting this.
• The trending content widget has been modified to give it a cleaner appearance. Thank you @Rem for suggesting this!
• I fixed up signatures so that they're a lot cleaner and have limitations that are automatically applied to every signature. You can read more about it here.
• We've posted our stance on AI-generated content. Thank you to @roydan for pointing this out.

 

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March 31, 2025

A little bit of a slow day again, but we do have some updates to share with you.

As usual, we'll add more to this list as the day goes on.

• @Apricot made an adjustment to notification e-mails, because I think we were all getting tired of the million e-mails the forum was sending us each day. Thank you to her for fixing this.
• The Trading Post node has been removed from the forum list. There's a reason for this: we're looking into getting a plugin to add a marketplace to the forum. This should help us make an even better marketplace, but it means I might have to rebuild the nodes or make entirely new ones.
• The maximum entries on the trending content widget has been increased from 5 to 10. Do let me know if this is too much, though.
• Drafts have been adjusted. For more information, read my post here.
• There were a couple of "pity trophies" that weren't working as intended. They've been removed and replaced with a starter trophy worth 2 points.

 

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April 1, 2025

Yeah, I'm up at midnight working on this.

Today, we're going to be working on resolving some of the unresolved feedback threads today.

... What? Oh, this isn't the April Fools' Day post. We're actually working on the unresolved feedback today.

• BlueSky, TikTok, and Pinterest have been added as prefixes in the social media discussion section. Thank you @roydan for suggesting this.
• New fields have been added to profiles that you can optionally fill out to describe your primary skills, soft skills, and why you're on Office Outlaw. You can read more about it here.
• A subforum for privacy and security has been added in. Thank you to @Rem for suggesting this.

Today was mostly a research day as we're looking into an add-on so that members can begin selling here. Once we have the add-on and The Trading Post fully set up, we will be reaching out to those of you with Founding Member status to see if you want to beta test the review process.

 

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April 2, 2025

It's 1AM at the time I'm posting this... I don't have anything clever to say about that.

• I made a quality of life change to the forum suggestions section: now when you go to create a thread, the "unresolved" prefix is automatically selected.
• Using the donations several of you have sent us, we've purchased a feedback system for our forum, so all of you should now have a feedback tab on your profiles. As many of you can imagine, this will be handy for our upcoming marketplace and freelancer sections. We've also made adjustments that we're excited to share with you, which you can read more about in our trading feedback site guide. Do let me know if any of the adjustments to the feedback add-on are too restrictive or cause issues, and I'll be happy to make adjustments to it.
• Trophies based on reaction score ratios have been added in. Additionally, I'm making all of the trophies fair game; meaning anyone has a chance to get all of them. This means I removed more specific trophies that were only given out to mods or admins.
• We updated to the latest version of Xenforo without completely destroying all of the hard work we've done. If you experience any issues, please post about it here.
• A Mobile Advertising section has been added in.
• The sidebar is now displayed throughout the forum. I've also adjusted the width of it. Please let me know in the feedback section if this causes any issues.
  • YES, I KNOW I BROKE THE SIDEBAR AND THINGS WERE GOING CRAZY. I WAS PANIC CLICKING AND CHANGING VALUES. It's all fixed now.
• Max signature banner sizes have been set to standard leaderboard ad sizes 728x90. Again, the forum automatically adjusts your signature, so don't worry about not getting it perfectly right; there's no warning here for messing up on the dimensions of a banner.
• Publicly displayed birthdays are now disabled by default for new registrations. Thanks @Rem for the suggestion!

 

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April 3, 2025

Yeah, another one going into the early mornings.

• Limited aignature spaces are now available to registered members. You can have up to 3 lines of text, but links and images cannot be added. We’re going to trial this for a bit and if everything goes well, then we can allow links and images. VIPs will instead get another benefit like 4-5 lines in a signature.
• "The Forge" has been renamed to "Tools At The Forge". This is to make the subforum purpose clearer, but now it sounds like one of those over-priced restaurants near me that charge $90 for a bean and cheese burrito with an orange slice.
• Highlights are now displayed in your user box on posts. Thanks to @Rem for the suggestion.
• I had to remove the CSS for those of you in the cosmetic Hot Rod group and even for my Forum Owner group since the CSS code was clashing with something Xenforo does when you upload profile backgrounds, leading to it breaking the code and giving it that glitched look.

I've also done a re-structing of the forum categories and some of the under-utlised subforums that should better organise the forum.

When I created this forum, it originally a black hat office board. However, since I moved it over to IM and general lifestyle, the office boards are used less than I intended to be. Some of them can also be consolidated so that we don't have an infinite-scroll worth of subforums.

• "The Cubicle" has been renamed to "General"
• I changed some sections such as "Downloads" and "The Rendezvous Point" to the General category from the Office Outlaw and IM categories respectively.
• Some subforums, such as hybrid work and remote work have been removed. Threads in this section have instead been moved to the "Work Life" section.
• A Business subforum has been created. Thank you @roydan for suggesting this!
• We got another update on the logo! A lot more progress has been made with it. Like I said, we have a professional designer working with us who's puts a lot of care into his work. I actually really like his vision and style when it comes this stuff, and I feel all of you are going to like this logo as well. He's also making our permanent favicon.

 

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April 4, 2025

Another late night updating the forum. So late that I nearly said "May the fourth be with you" a month early.

• The "Stylish Content" widget has been renamed to "What's Hot". Thanks @UnusualSubstance for this suggestion.
• We changed the name of VIP to Sapphire Status. VIP is kind of trite and over-used on forums, and we wanted to go with something that isn't used on a million other forums. Besides, Sapphire Status just rolls off the tongue and sounds delicious.
• The VIP Saloon and been renamed to the Sapphire Saloon (damn, that sounds so much better).
• Sapphire Status is available for purchase now. I had a hard time working at the pricing, but since I combined it with what was going to be a standalone Trader Membership, I settled on setting the price to $100/year. I know some want a level of exclusivity, but I did not want to charge too much or too little. I did consult with some other members in the community about the pricing before settling on it, so I hope this pricing seems fair to everyone else as well. I will look into alternative payment methods and even doing occasional discounts for it in the future.
• Text signatures are now displayed on the mobile view of the site. Thanks @roydan for the suggestion!
• The Tribunal section is now open! You can view it here. We're going to do everything we can to prevent abuse and scams on our forum, but we created this section to help those of you struggling with a transaction from another community member. It does not cost anything and it's meant to be used as a last resort.
• We have a new section in The Trading Post called, "Wanted: Goods & Services". This is a section where you can post an an ad for something you want to buy or if you need to hire a freelancer. This section is open to any member of the community to respond to, we just ask that you do your due diligence before working with anyone.
• The angry reaction has been removed. We're mostly just seeing if it fixes an issue, so it may be added back in later.
• The LMAO reaction is worth 2 reaction points instead of 1, so now it's on-par with the 'haha' reaction.
• I've made some SEO improvements to the website. We're actually already getting a decent amount of traffic from Google each week, but I want to optimise the forum further.

 

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April 5, 2025

It's 4AM. Do I even sleep anymore?

Okay, so the updates I've been working on this morning were mostly for SEO purposes. I won't share everything, not because it's a big secret, but because it was mostly just a lot of boring stuff like submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console.

• The subforum and category descriptions have all been updated! You'll find them to be... more descriptive.
• A "latest threads" widget has been added in thanks to a suggestion made by @Dopious.
• Some of the site guides have been updated as we've made some significant improvements to Office Outlaw recently. This is thanks to all of you who have been making suggestions and pointing out bugs.
• I don't know how all of us missed this, but the logo on the site was massive and made the header massive as well. Some adjustments have been made, so now the logo is smaller. This is thanks a suggestion from @Lukmat.
• @Impulse has made some more adjustments to the light theme, so you should find that tagged usernames appear in a light green colour now and no longer look like regular text.
• I've updated some of the trophies. For one, any trophies that required paid membership upgrades have been changed (I'm sure some of you noticed the "Scream" trophy for being here for 7 days). The trophy system is meant to be a fun thing for all members, not a pay-to-win feature.
• There's a new Announcements section. This is actually where this thread was moved to. I realised I had a nasty habit of dumping announcements in the feedback section that I clearly got from somewhere (hmm...). Because notice and update threads were in-between feedback threads, I noticed that even I was having a harder time going through them. Now, you can find any official announcements all in this section.

You know the drill, I'll share more updates as the day goes on.

 

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April 6, 2025

It's 2AM, so another late night, but I really missed working like this; I feel unbridled for the first time in 7 years.

Updates will be added below as the day goes on.

• I've added a quality of life (QOL) change to the prefixes: when you select them as you're creating a thread, they now have usage descriptions to help members understand what they're about. This is obvious with some prefix, but for ones like the black hat SEO prefix, it tells members that we have a separate prefix for link building, which is black hat SEO, but due to the general popularity of link building discussions in particular, they have their own prefix. This was done mostly in anticipation of a potential issue I could see happening, but it should help limit the number of mis-categorisations on Office Outlaw in the future.
• The forum feedback section has been updated to include more prefixes to better organise the section. The only one available to members is the "New" prefix, but now you can see the status of each feedback thread. I've also added in descriptions that appear at the top of the threads for each of these prefixes. This suggestion was made by @Rem.
• A "latest posts" widget has been added. This shows the 10 most recently bumped threads.
• @Impulse increased the width of the sidebar a bit just so things are a little easier to read.
• Just a small change, but if you go to the forum statistics, "Latest member" now says "Latest Outlaw". We're outlaws here!
• The angry reaction has been added back in. We only removed it temporarily to test something.
• The max character count for threads and posts has increased from 15k to 20k.
• The sidebars have been removed from the direct message view and direct message list because...
• A new add-on has been added at the recommendation of @Dopious! It's called Conversation Essentials, and you can read more about what it does here. I'll be adjusting the settings for it tonight, so I'll announce the changes to it once I'm done.

 

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April 7, 2025

Before you ask, no, I didn’t sleep.

Expect more updates throughout the day.

• We’ve made a significant amount of progress with The Trading Post. We’re going to start beta testing it this week, so expect to see some listings in there soon.
• The “latest posts” widget has been removed from the what’s new page because it was redundant.
• The new threads widget has been moved to the bottom of the what’s new page.
• The count for the new threads widget has been increased from 5 to 10.
• We’re going to be looking into making the rules here more well-defined today. Mostly just outlining more of the obvious stuff and making the rules easier to understand.
• The banned user group was properly implemented, so the styling of banned usernames appear correctly.
• A lot of efforts today were toward developing The Trading Post. We've officially finished conducting our first beta test review of it. We still have two more beta reviews to complete before we move on to the next phase of The Trading Post.
• We've standardised more of our rules, which you can find in the site guides section.
• A small quality of life change has been made to the descriptions of certain fields, mostly in The Trading Post.

I’ll try to sleep now. Probably… After looking into doing one more update…