News from the Top

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:

or

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:

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.

This story’s too good not to share.

I took my laptop to the Apple Store to fix a stuck latch button (which is attached to the part responsible for keeping the laptop lid closed). I arrived early, so while I was waiting for my appointment I decided to do my rounds around HG’s forums there, to keep an eye on the avatar threads, as well as checking out what some of the April Fool festivities were. I did this on a 24” iMac at the Apple Store, which was crowded at the time. (In the US most apple stores also duplicate as free internet cafes, so you can surf while you’re there as other shoppers look at computers, ipods, etc. around you)

Near the end of the rounds I came upon SWGBH. I was to regret that decision. Their April Fool’s prank was to set their forums in bright EGA colors, enough to traumatize any visitors, accompanied by seizure-inducing flashing animated GIFs for the logos and background.

I was browsing full screen.

On a 24” iMac.

Before I had time to react, the soundtrack came on.

Oh dear god. The iMac apparently had its volume set on max, so it blasted through its speakers for what seemed like an eternity.

By then everyone around me was staring at me.

So, thank you, SWGBH. You guys got me. There will be the mother of all paybacks come next April Fools Day – I have a year to think about my revenge :)

Oh, here’s another April fool’s joke – an amusing, but less humiliating one, was perpetrated by Botolf and his deft writing skills. ES even got into the act =D

Thanks to everybody who provided feedback on the avatars, and who helped us iron out bugs in the gravatar implementation. Special thanks to Stormraider and Meteora, both of whom solved the problems of gravatars not appearing at all for some people, even after hours of waiting.

If you were one of the users who had set up a gravatar account early in the day and had not seen your avatar appear on HG, it should appear now. This was the bug where if your email address wasn’t public, your gravatar didn’t show. Since admins and moderators have access to your email address, by default, they could see your avatar just fine, creating many moments of confusion and frustration in the forums. So, thanks again to Meteora for finding the cause of the problem.

The other bug was that if the HG account’s email address had capitals letter in it, the gravatar didn’t show. This was luckily fixed early in the day after Stormraider pointed it out to me.

Lastly, based on feedback, we’ve raised the size of the avatars to 40 pixels from 30. It is unlikely it will get any larger soon. If you want your avatar to look great though, the folks at Gravatar suggested uploading a picture that’s around 512×512 pixels in size. As with many things in life, keep your avatar simple so it’s easier to see what it is, especially when it’s shrink down to 40 pixels.

If you don’t like avatars at all, you can always turn it off in your user preferences page.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this update, and we hope to have many more in the future.

-Zen