News from the Top

VIPs are users who appear blue in our forums, and they are VIPs in the sense that what they say usually convey a lot of information about the game they are working on. Thus, we reserve the VIP title for regular, permanent game dev staff, given the attention that their posts get. When people see a name in blue, they naturally think that the person represents or speaks for the company.

Interns, by definition, are learning the trade, and don’t necessarily speak for the company. Plus they come and go, and if it became a regular thing it could be difficult to keep track of. Thus, we have decided to not grant VIP status to interns working in the industry. Exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis by the EXCOs if the intern was working as a community relations manager.

We pushed an update to the forums to fix a bug related to blue text inside the BBCode assistant bar at some sites. We also removed the “UserName: ” field above the BBCode Assistant bar as it was redundant—-the screen name is displayed in the navbar at the top in the welcome message. Behind the scenes we changed the way screen names were coded in HTML so that they utilitize CSS classes.

Note to forum HTML tinkerers

This deprecation notice applies to users who post in forums that have HTML enabled.

HTML code that interferes with the surrounding layout (such as breaking out of the message container, closing the parent table tags, etc.) are unsupported and will definitely break when we update our forum layout in an upcoming update projected to be released in January. Please adjust your posts accordingly.

It's a tradition for HG Seraphs to give their forums a skin on Halloween (... and April Fool's Day), so here are this year's "costumes". Enjoy!

We’ve pushed a maintenance update to the forums, with one new feature

New Features

• BBCode Assistant now works across all modern browsers with javascript enabled, thanks to the work done by HussarKnight

Bug Fixes

• Backslashes not escaped properly in the Forum Styles control panel (Thanks Aro)
• HTML Entities not escaped properly in the Forum Styles control panel
• Incorrect formatting for the Last-Logins table in the “My Accounts” area
• Moved google analytics javascript to the bottom of source code
• Minimum value check not performed for “max topics per page” when value exceeded maximum permitted

For the most part of Friday the forums sent out the wrong caching headers for threads, so that unless you performed a force-refresh in your browser (or cleared your cache), it would show you the cached version of that thread from the last time you saw it before 5am Friday. The bug ended up being a pair of single quotes that was supposed be double quotes, and once we fixed that around 3pm today everything returned to normal. Sorry about that.

Whenever you visit a forum index, topic index, or thread on the forums, the browser checks with the server to see if the page had changed since the last visit. If it hadn’t, the browser will load the cached version, and the script will stop right there without proceeding to query the forum database files, combine them with the forum templates, to serve up the HTML for your browser. This saves bandwidth, CPU processing time, and should result in a slightly faster feel to the forums. As far as I know we are one of a few handful forum applications out there (if not the only) that does proper browser caching (well, as of 3pm this afternoon anyway 8^) )