The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a new blue name joining our ranks.

 

That's right, Mournblade is our newly promoted community admin! Give him a nice handshake before he flees in horror from 14,500 pages of chat logs.

 

The recent issues with inconsistent staffing called for some changes, and Mournblade has proven himself more than capable of managing a community at a higher level than merely cleaning up after the messes as a moderator. As an administrator, he'll now work alongside me in appointing new staff, adapting the forums' layout to the needs of the community, maintaining rulesets, and simpler things like changing up the banner from time to time, in addition to his previous duties.

 

With new forces in TheWiiU.com's administration, we're now in a good position to roll out a number of changes we've been planning for a while to make this community a better place for everyone.

Solving these issues takes time. Even if it doesn't look like it, I'm aware of what's going on and am working behind the scenes to fix things up. Making threads about it in the meantime to vent about it isn't helping anyone, and certainly won't speed anything up. This is a privately owned website, not a democratic state, so please understand that the concept of a personal agenda is very much relevant here.

Threads usually evolve from the OP's idea into a communal discussion. Giving the OP the power to end or remove a discussion they happened to start at any time doesn't serve any useful purpose. In the event that a discussion gets out of hand and needs to be moderated, anyone (including the OP) can and is encouraged to use the report system to let a moderator know about it. They can then lock or remove the thread as needed.

 

 

 

However I was very surprised when i first joined this forum and found out you couldnt delete your own posts or your own threads. I've been a member of several forums over the past couple of years and almost all of them allowed you to delete your own content. And all those forums have been successful. I'm not sure why this forum doesnt allow you to do this.

 

Every community is different. If you have a legitimate reason to have a post or thread removed, report it with the report system and make your case in the report form. Users previously had the ability to remove their own posts here, and all I saw the privilege being used for was removing perfectly legitimate content for no discernible reason.

This change was intentional. That list wasn't all too useful, so I killed it. It looks like most of the feedback on this has been positive, so it's not coming back in the foreseeable future.

I'm not taking anything out on anyone. I would just like to review the logs and see if it is detrimental to the community here as a whole. Chatrooms, by their very nature, are exponentially more difficult to moderate than forums, and the very spontaneity that the chat regulars love about it is what makes it so difficult to moderate.

 

Moreover, considering that chat message are seen once and then almost never again, they don't add any publicly visible content to the site, which is sort of what forum communities are all about.

 

If you want the chatroom to remain, show us that you can use it responsibly and in a balance with the public forums, rather than starting a "campaign" to "save" it. The fate of the chatroom rests on what we see in the logs, not what you say about it on the forums.

May I please have the URL that ad led to? I'll be happy to blacklist it, but I can only do that if I know its destination.

I believe I got this fixed. The original CSS for the header turned out to be a little funky, and had to be approached a different way to achieve the same visual effect without creating that horizontal scrolling on occasion.

I have a tool set up here that's supposed to run every registration past a massive database of known spammers, but it seemed to have been acting up. Fixed now, though, and I ran through the member list and banned every spam account I could find which had been registered in the meantime. This shouldn't be an issue anymore.

 

If, perchance, you happen to find any spam or spammers around the forums still, please report them using the report button on their posts.

Those are people.
They have so much fun in chat they bring it out into the rest of the forum expecting the same leniency because they're so funny in the chat.
They get 9001 likes and parade around like a boss on acid.

I think it's less about the chat existing and the topics which are discussed there, and more about the people who are using it and not receiving punishment for one reason or another.

It's a people problem at the end of the day when people can't use a chatroom responsibly. But, from my observations at MLP Forums - a much larger community than this one - chatrooms have a way of making people feel a bit too relaxed, sometimes bringing out the very worst in them. I don't think the solution lies in locking the chatroom up any further - all I see that leading to is increasing the feeling of exclusivity some people get by removing it even further from the general public than it already is.

Each and every single message in the chatroom is logged. Following some of the feedback presented in this topic, I'll make sure that the logs get reviewed so we can make an informed decision about the chatroom's future.

CKEditor works best with pastes if you use one of the three paste buttons (in the red box):



They offer a variety of options for handling the formatting of the content. With that said, I'd advocate a simple link to the original source over reproducing the content, anyway.

This site is actually running on an older version of IP.Board, and a variety of changes have been made to the editor since then. I'll look into getting us upgraded, which might come with some improvements to direct pasting.

If you see spammy threads coming up, hit that bright red report button on the OP and they'll be taken care of.

An arcade would necessitate an additional staff commitment to maintain properly, and to top off, isn't something I really see being all that beneficial to the goal of TheWiiU.com to be a discussion forum. In a time when the staff power around here seems to be going missing in action, it's not a terribly smart idea to add additional burdens when the existing responsibilities aren't being attended to properly.

I added Keanu's icons today. Sorry for the delay, but special thanks to him for making the set.

Im pretty sure this is a topic that's been adresses before. We used to be able to do it for a short while, but Feld0 scratched the system because it was riddled with bugs. We won't get them back.

On the subject of the like system, I have no problems with it. I prefer by to see a post with 70 likes than see a thread derailed by "this/+1/took it right out of my mouth" posts. It's happened before.

Also, saying it's the system's fault that some people abuse it is one of the stupidest things I've read in a while. It's equivalent to saying that matches should be banned because some people have started fires.

Edit: Lol, fail at not noticing Nollog basically said the same thing with one sentence.

Pretty much this. ^

IP.Board's implementation of status updates is rather spartan, and implementing likes on them properly is much more trouble than it's worth.

I can't see this happening, realistically. Apart from the fact that it isn't technically possible with IP.Chat, the ability to "like" chat messages sounds like it will bring a lot more bad behaviour than good.

IP.Chat isn't exactly known for being reliable. If you get kicked out for inactivity, just hop back in. Unfortunately, there isn't much more that can be done about it because it doesn't run on servers I control.

There's a little "Report" button on every single post that exists precisely for this purpose. I suggest using it if you come across spam or any other content that really doesn't need to be there.

That field is only visible to site staff and yourself, so there's no privacy issue to worry about with it. It will not be getting removed or made user-editable in the foreseeable future, as it is useful data for us.

This isn't technically possible to accomplish with IP.Board in its current state, but it looks like what's needed to request the feature has been done. It's up to IPS to make the change now, which will require a fundamental refactoring of the notifications system.

This has been added.

Considering that this is a Wii U forum first and foremost, and not so much a chatroom, I left out the red badge on the Chat link in the new theme so as not to draw any more attention to the chatroom than to any other area of the site.

The chatroom is an area of the site that doesn't produce any publicly visible or searchable content. While I acknowledge that it's a beloved community hotspot, focusing too much activity and attention there will ultimately detract from the amount of publicly available content that gets created on the forums, which is indexed by search engines and found by guests, who subsequently join to contribute to it. The chatroom regulars can always click into the chatroom to see who's there.

The migration was completed without a hitch and the search engine has been reconfigured on the new server. Enjoy!

Is MLPF moving with us?

MLP Forums was moved to the new server Sunday morning. It was the "guinea pig" of the migration, so to speak.

I know you hate the idea of sharing server space with a pony forum, Nollog; but TheWiiU.com would be on a cheap shared hosting package if it wasn't for MLP Forums (and you may remember how well that worked the last time we had 400+ users online at once). It's because of MLPF that all my other sites enjoy the luxury of a high-end dedicated server.

Thanks feld0, just wondering if this will change the apperance of the site at all?

No. I'm just moving the site to a new server - nothing is being changed. Everything will look and work exactly as it does now.

The only visible change this may bring is faster response times, as the new server is running newer and better versions of just about everything.

Heads up! I'll be moving TheWiiU.com to a shiny new server in a little less than 15 hours. It has identical specs to the current one, but is running the latest versions of CentOS, Sphinx, and PHP; the latter two boast some pretty incredible improvements in performance and resource efficiency.

This is already a pretty fast site, but the new server will make even faster.

Maintenance will begin at 11:00 PM Pacific Time (GMT-8) and is expected to take approximately 30 minutes.