News from the Top

We’ve pushed the update for 2.4.1 to the servers. This is a bug-fix release.

Changelog

• Youtube embed code now updated to be in a widescreen aspect ratio [#97]
• Auto-URL interpreter now recognizes *.heavengames.com as valid URLs [#99]
• Auto-URL interpreter thought “www.” alone is a valid URL [#99]
• Fixed grammatical error on post reply page [#98]
• Hidden forums are now visible to forum admins [#94]
• Moderators list not updating to reflect latest changes
• Main forum URL is now index.cgi
• Copyright notices consolidated and automated
• Linebreaks were stripped from multi-line code content [#96]
• Signature text were at the wrong size [#93]
• The code tag messed up <, >, [, and ] characters
• Blank lines were not appearing for Firefox 3.5.x users [#92]
• HTML Entities were not encoded inside code tags [#91]

We have updated the forums to 2.4. This was a huge update with 70 changes---new features and bug fixes---made to the forums. Some of the changes will affect how you post, so please read carefully.

Changes to embedding video

When embedding video, the video URLs must be surrounded by [video]...[/video] tags. This was done to fix problems with wrapping them inside other BBCode tags. This change will also serve as the foundation for customizing the embedded video (such as video size, high def, etc.) in future releases.

Lastly, we now support embedding videos from gametrailers.com. To embed videos, copy the URL of the video from the browser's address bar and put it inside the video tag, like so:

[video]http://www.gametrailers.com/video/fall-of-wow-wrath/59792[/video]

Big changes to including source code in your posts

[htmlon]...[htmloff], [ubbon]...[ubboff], [emcode]...[/emcode] are all removed, and in their place is the [code]...[/code] tag. In addition, URLs, emoticons, videos, and HTML—including forbidden ones like javascripts and inline CSS—are preserved.

Other notable miscellaneous changes

• Smilies no longer wreck URLs and such
• The URL detector has gone through a major overhaul
• A "Show all replies" link has been added to the post reply form which will open the thread in a new window
• BBCode assistant toolbar is now enabled by default for browsers that have Javascript Enabled
• Wayward spaces no longer inserted into URLs, HTML Entities, etc.
• Large images will effect the appearance of scroll bars around the post it was embedded in
• The << character sequence no longer disappears after posting
• A "center signature" option have been added
• Block-level tags such as center and indent are no longer supported in signatures; they were used to get around the fact that sigs should not be more than six lines.
• Cancel button on login form no longer redirects to a page that doesn't exist

Thanks (in no particular order) to Papaya, Luke Gevearts, Shelper, Pecunia, Silk, Kester, Elpea, BP, Pellaeon, HussarKnight, Alexastor, and Sith for their help.

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^) )

The forums software was updated to 2.3.1 to fix minor bugs.

Details:

• Links to YouTube and Vimeo inside the URL BBCode tag are no longer converted into embedded videos (Fixes [#6])
• The text-wrapper function no longer truncates URLs inside BBCode tags (Fixes [#7])
• “me” is now an allowed username for email addresses (Fixes [#4])
• Embeddable content only shows up on the news when the news database was rebuilt. It should show up when posting news. (Fixes [#9])
• Fixed unquoted HTML attribute on the post reply page. (Fixes [#3])
• Fixed “Unterminated string constant” error on the login page. (Fixes [#11])

An oft-requested feature is the ability to embed video on the forums. We’ve gone and done just that.

To post a video, just post the link to the video. For example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3p6c2m4BCU

or

http://www.vimeo.com/1950685

They will embed the flash player into the post. These videos will not autoplay – you will still have to click on the play button to start the video.

If you are on dialup, you can disable the embed by going into your User Preferences and checking the “Hide Embedded Content” checkbox. After saving your preferences, video embeds will appear as links instead.

We currently support only YouTube and Vimeo embeds.

Forums that have been archived, or have been around too long and have low activity, are usually shown as having only a couple threads or no threads at all in the forums (even for a huge archive like the Knights of the Round Table forum on HGMain), so we’ve made a trivial change in the code so that for any forum it’ll display a full page of the most recent topics on page one of the topic listing, no matter how old the most recent thread was.

Props to Jay for coming up with the title for the post

Please watch the following before registering on our forums:

How To Behave On An Internet Forum

Thanks to Papaya for the heads up :)

Bad news … we’ve had to make an adjustment to the max # of topics and replies per page allowed in the user preferences. It has been lowered to 50 to alleviate stress on the servers. We’ll continue to keep an eye on things and adjust that number as necessary.

All avatars are subject to the Code of Conduct. If we discover an avatar that violates the Code of Conduct, one of our moderators will contact the offender over e-mail with a request to change the avatar. At the discretion of our moderators, this may be accompanied with a temporary ban on the account to hide the Gravatar until the requested change takes effect on Gravatar’s servers. As a guideline, if the offense is deemed extremely serious and required immediate action, the moderator will ban the account temporarily for a period between 12-24 hours. (This will change in the near future, when moderators will be able to disable/enable avatar and signature use on accounts. Forum superusers can do that right now, but there’s only 4 superusers.)

Examples for violations include avatars that contain graphically disturbing images (such as goatse and tubgirl), vulgaries (e.g., bitch, shit, fuck, cunt, whore), racial / ethnic / religion slurs or symbols (e.g., image of the swastika), pornography, and nudity (anything that is not acceptable at a public beach in the US where families are present).

Lastly, Gravatar is a public service not affiliated with HeavenGames. We have chosen to display only Gravatars that are rated G and PG. If a gravatar rated G or PG that should be rated R or X, any user can file an abuse report at the Gravatar site, who will take the necessary steps to resolve the situation.