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.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 6, 2025

We slowed down with doing updates to the forum for a bit as we needed a break.

• As part of a suggestion by @roydan, we've turned reactions back on in the Trading Post.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 7, 2025

We've got one new update for everyone today!

• A "Rest In Peace" status has been added in, as suggested by @roydan and voted for by the community.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 8, 2025

We’ve got another couple of updates for you today.

• As suggested by @Word Wizard, there’s a new “ask the staff” thread in the suggestions section. It’s meant to be used to ask any questions you have about the forum in case you can’t find the answers you’re looking for.
• We've added in a few new trophies for hitting certain milestones for karma, just to give karma a little more purpose.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 9, 2025

Yeah, we're back to making improvements to the forum each day... for now at least.

• We did some work on the trophy system by removing redundant trophies. This means I lost my silver stars, but whatever...
• You'll notice on the desktop homepage, there's now a scrollbar on both feeds. This was added in not just to be able to show more threads on the homepage, but to also keep the feeds even with each other in terms of dimensions.
• Thanks to a suggestion by @Vix that the community voted for, we now have a auto-merge function here on Office Outlaw. You can read more about it here: https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/about-office-outlaws-auto-merge-function.1665/
• We've made some fairly minor SEO improvements to the site.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 11, 2025

This morning was certainly busy, wasn't it!

We've got a few new updates for everyone today.

• @Impulse and I have expanded the sidebar, removed some of the less popular sections from the list, and added in a new "Trading Post" widget to the sidebar as well.
• The automatic merge feature's timer has been adjusted from 60 minutes to 15 minutes. This means if you make back-to-back posts within 15 minutes of each other on the same thread, they'll be merged into one post automatically.
• A couple of new rules have been added in for posting in the incorrect section and posting off-topic replies in non-Saloon threads: rules 2.8 and 2.9. You can read about them here. Note that we generally steer clear of issuing notices unless someone is being deliberately harmful, so "violating" these rules just means the thread gets moved or a moderator asks everyone to stay on topic. They just exist to let members know how we moderate the forum in specific circumstances.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 16, 2025

We've just got a couple of minor updates for everyone today.

• We've changed the number of notice points for a temp ban to 9 and a perma ban to 12 (from 15 and 20 respectively). It's hard to get notices on OO, and from warnings we've already issued, we determined that anyone getting multiple notices in a short span of time is just trying to cause issues rather than be a part of the community.
• We've updated the subforum description for The Saloon. Previously, it mentioned there being "no rules" in there. This was technically true when we started the forum, but isn't true now, so that line has been removed.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 17, 2025

We have a couple of updates this morning that change the display of the OP indicator you see in threads.

• The default "Thread Starter" phrasing has been changed to "OP".
• The "OP" indicator is now to the left of the post date on mobile. This is so that it's more consistent with how it's displayed on the desktop version. Also, the old OP ribbon over the avatar was annoying to look at.

Tomorrow, we're looking at implementing an improved search feature and an improved reports function to Office Outlaw once we're finished with our testing.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 19, 2025

Just a single update for today, but you'll like this one!

• We've added some improvements to the search functionality here that should provide more accurate results and improved search ranges. One part of this everyone will especially love is that we have search operators now, like the ones Google uses. For example, using a - symbol before a word omits results with that specific word in it. You can also perform an exact match search by using quotes. By improving our own search tool, you no longer have to use site: officeoutlaw.com to do searches (but you can still do that if you'd like to, we just wanted to give all of you another option ).Here's the official site guide on the search operators: https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/using-search-operators-on-office-outlaw.1788/

Edit: we made a couple more updates today as well.

• We've increased the trophy and account age requirements to purchase Sapphire Status today. You can read more about it here: https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/new-trophy-account-age-requirements-for-sapphire-status.1798/
• We have a new service type pre-check available on the support desk. This is meant to be used by those looking to become traders to make sure their listing type can be submitted before upgrading to Sapphire. https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/service-type-pre-checks-available-on-the-support-desk.1800/

 

[Zwielicht]

June 24, 2025

So there was an annoying issue where the forum would slow down suddenly. I was ready to blame the server again, but there was actually another culprit: our forum was getting visited by a lot of bots.

This has been gradually slowing the site down since March, especially as our forum has been growing.

There were three types of bots that were really annoying in particular as they absolutely swarm the site with hundreds of their own bots at once and offer absolutely no benefits to us.

Apparently, these three bots are problematic for other Xenforo forums owners as well and have a nasty habit of ignoring robots.txt files. So, we went ahead and blocked these bots via Cloudflare, and they're no longer swarming the site. Instantly, the forum has gone back to fast-loading pages, so we can consider that problem resolved for now.

 

[Zwielicht]

June 25, 2025

We've been cleaning the forum up in an effort to make it more presentable for when we start doing more to promote it.

• The mobile advertising section has been removed. Nobody requested this one as we just put it in when we were setting up the subforums, but we don't see this one really being used. So, we moved the 3 threads that were in there and all posted in April into the general money making section. If there's more of a demand for it in the future, we can make a prefix for it, and if it becomes a really popular topic, then we can look into creating a subforum again.
• The monetisation section has been removed. Technically, this was actually just a duplicate of the general money making section.
• The general money making section has been renamed simply to Online Income. To be honest, I hate the way the word "money" sounds, so I felt something a little cleaner and more official-sounding would suit this forum better.
• By the request of @Octavia and as voted on by the community, we have new prefixes in the AI Solutions section.