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

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

While I have nothing (yet) against the registration activities of certain individuals who shall remain unnamed (but you know who you are), please be advised that certain moderators (myself included) have a tendency to decide to use or upgrade to the heavier penalty vs. a lighter one (e.g., an official warning vs. an unofficial warning, a ban vs. a warning, a month ban vs. a week, a week ban vs. a day) should, after a check for smurves, it is discovered that you own multiple accounts, should you run afoul of the Code of Conduct accidentally or intentionally.

Two cross site scripting vulnerabilities were recently discovered recently on forums that had HTML enabled during testing. This bugfix fixes those problems, as well as addressing some other minor problems and annoyances. This is not the year-end forum update with new features – that will come before 2006 rolls around.

Changes:

• Added more ports to check for an open proxy in the registration sentinel
• Added more major ISP web caches to the exclusion list in the registration sentinel
• Fixed a bug with registration notification messages where a field was still included in the email even thouigh it’s blank
• The following tags are now filtered out of user posts: INPUT, TEXTAREA, and SELECT (Tags are dangerous for anyone in administration mode)
• Changed members directory permission settings in order for the staff page authentication to work
• The option to allow Cascading Style Sheets and Inline styles for users to use in their HTML posts have been disabled. The forums will now always strip CSS directives from posts (CSS allows javascript in url() attributes)
• The face attribute is now stripped from FONT tags in user posts to maintain readibility in the forums.

The forums have been updated to 2.9.2.2. Unlike the previous release, it contains one new feature and several minor changes and bug fixes:

• NEW: More abuse/anti-spam checks implemented
• NEW: Added more major ISP proxy/caches to the list of hosts excluded from IP-Check tests
• CHG: The site ID is now included in warning/rejection notification emails
• CHG: The Database ID is now included in warning/rejection notification emails
• BUG: The year in the registration date in warning/rejection notification emails wasn’t properly formatted

I recently released version 2.9.2.1 of the forum software. The new features are focused on combatting various spamming and abuse problems we’ve been having, to allow for Zope verification, and also to accomodate the introduction of ESO2:

• New ESO2 field in profile
• New Password Recovery system
• Improved IP checks during registration
• Login IP Tracker
• Centralized login/logout log

(Hrm… after updating the changelog I think this should’ve been 2.9.3, but I’m too lazy to update the version number. There’s also several new features that are being worked on for 2.9.3 sooooo…)