Site stuff

News posts and global announcements are made here. As these posts concern the entire site they will also appear on the front page.
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archonix
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Executive Officer
Posts: 7540
Joined: Sat Jul 21, 2001 12:45 pm
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Site stuff

Post by archonix » Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:32 am

The update has taken place, as you can probably see. There are of course some bugs still working out of the system. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, the custom display names everyone had on the old forum don't seem to have made their way across to the new system. You can, however, give yourself a new display name by logging into the fancy new User Control Panel and clicking on "profile". Some other missing features will be added back as and when I work out the best way to do it.

Avatars are also a bit screwed up. Differences between the old and new systems mean that a lot of the avatars haven't been sized properly. You can fix this in your profile.
The more observant of you may have noticed a few moments over the last week when the site went... away. Not far away, but away all the same. I've been making final tests on an upgrade of the entire website to a customised version of phpBB3, with a view to adding in a bunch of the features I mentioned in the plan a while back.

SMF has been a pretty decent forum for a while, but it's creaky and annoying now and I want to do things that it just won't allow without extensive bashing.

Things that will come at various times after the update:
  • More real news! Less of this techy talk and more actual Simpsons and Futurama news will be posted, eventually including "promoted" posts from various boards that will allow me to save valuable seconds that would be spent writing a "look at this thing on the forum" post.
  • User galleries! I'm in the process of writing a set of tools for members - that's you lot - to create personal image galleries. And these tools will actually work, unlike the previous attempts, and will be totally integrated into the existing forum in ways that I haven't even thought about.
  • Blogs! Though, really, who needs a blog when you can post on a forum and have lots of fun there? But even so, it's nice to occasionally have somewhere more personal to rant.
  • A new look! Though, really, it'll be more of an updated look. A little shinier and niftier.
  • More and better competitions! Details to come.
The image galleries will be the number 1 priority once the forum has been updated. After that the various other features mentioned will be appearing over the coming months. Any other suggestions will be highly appreciated.
Our choicest plans have fallen through, our airiest castles tumbled over, because of lines we neatly drew and later neatly stumbled over.
— Piet Hein - Grooks
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