Please Read The Official Changelog

[Zwielicht]

April 28, 2025

We only have a couple of updates for all of you today.

• @Impulse added a forum navigation menu across the forum. It's not expanded by default to make it smaller. You can find this navigation menu everywhere except the homepage (you know, because the homepage already lists all of the forums). This might be a nice familiar feature for many of you, and it also has the benefit of allowing you to quickly switch between subforums.
• Because of the navigation menu being present across the forum, we've limited the latest posts and latest threads widget to just the homepage. This also gives the homepage more of a purpose as well.
• @Impulse added pagination on the mobile view at the request of @Vix. This is disabled by default on Xenforo, so please let us know if you notice any weird display issues around the forum.
• @Impulse also made some adjustments to the user drop-down menu at the request of @Octavia.
• I removed the birthday trophy as @roydan pointed out that it could cause some privacy issues. After looking into it, it does say the date the trophy was received on your profile. Begone, birthday trophy! Some other questionable trophies have been removed as well.

We're aware that the navigation bar looks a little dated. This seems to be the only add-on that provides a functional navigation bar based on user permissions (i.e., you only see the sections you have access to). The one we're all used to was custom-coded, but lacked that functionality. https://xenforo.com/community/threads/navigation-sidebar-widget.152181/#post-1273460

We should be able to easily make adjustments to the design of it, so we'll look into doing that over the next few days. We're also considering limiting which sections appear in it, but that's a little difficult to decide on at this stage.

 

[Zwielicht]

April 29, 2025

I posted this a little late, but here's the change log for the 29th.

• I know this is a small feat, but today was the first day that we had over 30 members online at once! Because of this, I've now increased the maximum number of names displayed in the "Outlaws Online" widget from 30 to 50.
• At some point, we want to lift the manual approval for sign-ups. When we do this, we'll re-enable e-mail verification, but we're also setting up some things to reduce the number of bots and spammers from signing up. Now, these weren't cautions I was able to do before, but they should work quite well without affecting genuine users.
• We've blocked accounts from registering from domains we've seen bots and spammers use.
• We made several other security-related changes. We're not going to go into great detail about these, but this is a priority for us as we want to make sure everyone's accounts and data remain safe.
• The "charge" BBcode tag has been removed. It was meant to be a feature for fun, and we might enable it in The Saloon later on, but there's too much potential in it for abuse. This is something many of you have stated, and after looking into it, we agree.

 

[Zwielicht]

April 30, 2025

Today was a slow day in terms of updates. We're mostly working on some stuff in the background, so the next few days might also be a bit slow.

• Our removal of the charge BBCode tag yesterday did not work for some reason. We've applied a new fix to that, and with the help of several members to test it this time, we can confirm that it no longer works.
• The "New" prefix is now selected by default in the Sapphire Suggestions section.
• "Poke" has been changed to "headpat" after many of you overwhelmingly voted for the change.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 1 2025

I've got two updates for everyone today... just two... but you're going to like them!

Edit: 3 updates, actually!

• You can finally enable push notifications here. Just go to your preferences settings and click the "Enable Push Notifications" button. That's it! All registered members can enable to this. This also means those of you who wanted use the "install the app" feature on your mobile device can do so and have a "mobile app" of Office Outlaw.
• The voting for @Impulse's suggestion for a guides section has concluded. You can find the new Sapphire Guides subforum in the Sapphire Section.
• I've added something that adds in additional definitions for bot sessions as I know some "guests" were actually bots, but not being picked up as such. This should provide us with a somewhat more accurate view of how many real guests we have.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 2, 2025

Our forum is growing quite quickly as we're already at 200 members!

We've been working on limiting potential abuse and issues that might arise when we switch from manual appovals to e-mail verification approvals.

• In preparation of eventually remove our manual approval process, we updated what kind of usernames are allowed. Essentially, A-Z, numbers, spaces, hyphens, brackets, and underscores are allowed. Everything else (like @, $, ', ?, Ж) is disallowed.
• The maximum allowed characters in a username is now 30 to 16 based on some data provided by other forum owners. We'll see if this is too restrictive, but it's to prevent most usernames from going to a second line in the profile box.
• We've added more disallowed words to our list for usernames. It's obvious stuff I'm not going to write out here.
• Platinum Status has been added in, and we've promoted some members to start it off.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 3, 2025

I nearly forgot to post the changelog as I was busy writing the newsletter.

• The maximum notice points (our warning points) a user can receive before being permanently banned has been increased from 12 to 20. We feel fortunate that we've only had to issue 3 notices since March (2 for advertising or 1 for AI spam), but as I always say, it's far better to guide members than to ban them from the platform.
• We've been working on streamlining our site guides to be more informative and our rules to be more consistent.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 4, 2025

We've got a few new updates for you!

• We made a new subforum where members can discuss their wordpress websites, Wix websites, plugins for websites, themes for websites, that kind of thing. We actually didn't have anything for that, so it made sense to add it in.
• We fixed an issue with push notifications that started up in the early afternoon.
• We added a "Wanted" and "Download" prefix to the public Downloads and Sapphire Downloads sections. "Download" is selected by default, but this was ultimately done as a suggestion by @ATruringtest. I've also applied the correct prefixes to existing threads in those sections.
• Sticky threads now actually stand out! We made them a lighter green colour from the default link green to make them look more special.

Also, I'm aware that the light theme needs some work again. I'll try working on that later to see if I can make text on it easier to read along with some design adjustments.

 

[Impulse]

May 5, 2025

Yes, it's me this time! Just a few updates for today.

• Stripe payments are now accepted on the Upgrades page. https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/stripe-payments-are-now-accepted-on-the-upgrades-page.1004/
• We've been regularly updating our rules so that they're more consistent with our actions. We're keeping to our commitment to be more hands off and not limit discussion topics as best as we can, so none of these rule updates will impact any genuine users.
• The phrase 'Mark read' in the alerts pop-up has been changed to "Mark All As Read" to make it clearer to users.

 

[Zwielicht]

May 9, 2025

We had take a break when it came to updating the forum.

• @Impulse added Platinum section to forum list sidebar for those of you who have access to it.
• I updated the rules the rules in the Platinum Saloon to permit religious and political discussions.
• I've added an Udemy Giveaway prefix to the Sapphire and regular giveaways and discounts section. https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/section-for-udemy-free-coupons.1066/
• We've added a new "Huh?" reaction to the reactions list. https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/huh-shrugs-scratching-my-head-reaction.894/
• We fixed a readability issue with quote blocks, so the background of quote blocks is lighter than the background of posts, making them easier to distinguish. https://officeoutlaw.com/threads/qu...ghter-background-to-improve-readability.1036/

 

[Zwielicht]

May 10, 2025

We've got a few updates for you today, mainly some quality of life changes.

• @Impulse added Platinum section to forum list sidebar.
• As mentioned by @p3n7357, the on active pagination hover text colour has been fixed. We're ideally looking for a better fix for it in the future, but it's readable now.
• This was something else that @p3n7357 also brought up, but we made a slight adjustment between the unread thread title colour in thread lists to make it more distinct from the read thread title colour.