Feld0

IP.Chat is quite a glitchy piece of software. It's supposed to auto-kick you after 30 minutes of being idle, but whether it actually does or not is up in the air. In my experience, ad blockers (regardless of whether you have the site whitelisted or not - it's enough to just have one enabled) often cause problems with it. If you don't use one, then IP.Chat is likely just having a bad day.

Unfortunately, there's virtually nothing that can be done about it, as IP.Chat is a remotely hosted solution that runs on IPS's servers, not my own.

What even is this?

There's a version of the site with an alternate, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic-themed banner at the top. Looks like the banner got glitched up during today's server migration. This has been fixed now.

To those of you confused over why I allow swearing at MLP Forums and don't allow it here, first of all, being a brony has nothing to do with anything. I've written up a different ruleset for each of my two communities that I believe to suit each community's best interests, and don't believe in "one-size-fits-all" solutions. If both of my forums are supposed to have the exact same rules and policies just because I own them, I might as well merge them together into the same site. Would make management easier, right? It would actually be a disastrous scenario on multiple levels.

Believe it or not, the average member on MLP Forums is older than the average member here on TheWiiU.com. The members I have over there are generally less likely to take offense to swearing and don't actually do too much of it. The "CAPS LOCK PONY" topic Elric linked to is the exception rather than the norm, and if you look closely you'll see that it is in the site's equivalent of a "spam" section where not taking things seriously is virtually a rule (with that said, it is also an old topic and its author has since been chided for overdoing it as well). It's not exactly a good representative topic of the community over there.

We have a few users here who aren't even teenagers yet; and in my experience, debates over gaming tend to get very ugly very fast if people are allowed to swear. For this particular community, we can avoid a lot of potential issues by just not allowing profanity to begin with.

Swearing is against TheWiiU.com's rules. You shouldn't be doing it anyway - and a pony-themed swear filter is all the more reason for you to not do it. ;P

(you might not actually believe this, but I implemented the pony-themed swear filter well over a year ago, long before I even knew about MLP:FiM)

IP.Board only allows the swear filter to be controlled globally. It is impossible to toggle it on a per-user basis, as your post is processed and filtered for swear words before being saved into the database.

I put together a countdown timer to Nintendo's press conference at E3, where (among other things) we expect to finally get a look at some real Wii U games.

Here are the embed codes, ready for copypasta!

BBCode (for forum posts and signatures)

[url=http://wiiugo.com/][img]http://wiiugo.com/countdown/e3.png[/img][/url]

HTML (for websites and blogs)

<a href="http://wiiugo.com/" title="Wii U News"><img src="http://wiiugo.com/countdown/e3.png" title="Wii U E3 Countdown" /></a>

It would be really cool to see it spread around all over this forum and even on other sites, so feel free to use it anywhere you like! Don't worry about sparing my bandwidth - I've got a dedicated server with oodles of it.

I set up a new search backend called Sphinx, which seamlessly replaces the native MySQL fulltext search method we used before. Sphinx maintains its own search indexes separately from the database, so running a search will create no additional load on the database. This means better and more consistent site speed and loading times for everyone.

But moreover, Sphinx itself is much better at returning relevant results than MySQL as well. So when you search for something, the results should be much closer to what you were expecting to find!

Finally, there are a few specific usability changes I'd like to share with you:

• The minimum word length has been lowered to 2 characters.
• Sphinx can perform a wildcard search to match a partial word, using an asterisk as the wildcard. For example, running a search query for game* will match games and gameboy
• Sphinx updates its search index every 15 minutes. New posts and topics may take up to 15 minutes to become searchable ("View New Content" is unaffected, by the way, as it does not use Sphinx).

Enjoy the new and improved search engine, everyone! Hopefully, it'll help us avoid getting as many duplicate topics.

But in the end it always comes back, nothing is lost.

And if their server doesn't have proper DDOS protection yet, then it's best that they find a new one.

And while I know that it's technically impossible to be 100% protected from DDOS attacks. There are plenty of measures that can be taken to prevent them from happening. A popular method is iptables.

One does not simply get a server with "proper" DDOS protection. To be frank, "properly" DDOS-protected servers are well beyond my budget, and there's a good reason most hosting companies don't offer any such protection - the necessary hardware to implement it properly is extremely expensive (the idea is that you want to mitigate the attack before it reaches the server it is targeted at).

In the end the point is that it's always smart to take precautions.

P.S. I doubt the botnet that attacked MLP forms is the size of the botnet that was needed to take down a government site.

Here I found some stuff for you guys to look over. Maybe it will help.

http://www.unixsurge...-from-ddos.html

http://deflate.medialayer.com/

http://seclists.org/...cs/2012/Feb/131

Of course, Most options will hinge on how far you are willing to go. So I suggest taking some time to think about if it's worth it, and if the attackers are likely to strike again.

I've set up Deflate, and CSF's anti-DDOS measures are already configured. The botnet that attacked MLP Forums was, at any rate, large enough to create a 1 Gbps UDP flood.

Of course, that's a given.  I'm just saying that if the MLP forums can still be taken down even with enough security measures...  The Equestria Daily and Ponychan sites probably have better security than MLP forums as they are larger targets and I almost have never heard of them being down.

Equestria Daily is hosted on Blogger, so asking someone to DDOS it is pretty much asking them to DDOS Google. As for Ponychan, they've fallen prey to DDOS attacks in the past.

The attacks do seem to have subsided, at any rate. Combined with the awesome new dedicated server I moved everything to, things should be running faster and smoother than ever before.

Really i didn't know the site existed until now. So really i never joined. I prefer the wii u go anyways.

Wii 2 Blog is Wii U Go. The site had a name change when the Wii U was announced in June 2011, but it had existed as Wii 2 Blog since September 2010.

It's kind of awesome how Wii U Go and this forum are about 1.5 years old already, even though the Wii U is still many months away.

This is why you should always include a source link when posting stuff you found on other sites.

The screenshots were published with this article: http://www.cinemable...CARS-41448.html

And the Nintendo logo in them is meaningless:

Slightly Mad has denied responsibility for the Nintendo livery (but not the Wii U release), with Vittorio Rapa saying, "these are fan-produced liveries, they doesn't come officially from our game (and so the logos applied to them)."

Sorry to dash your dreams, everyone, but it looks like we'll have to keep waiting to get some actual Wii U shots.

I can easily replace the like buttons with an upvote/downvote reputation system, which would more or less achieve what you're looking for. However, we had this on 3DS Buzz back when I was still an admin there, and I spent 80% of my time moderating votes. It was a nuisance for moderators every time someone complained that their post was unfairly disliked and prompted an investigation, and I removed the system entirely because it proved to be such a waste of the staff's time. I don't want to put myself or my moderators through that ever again.

The Like system is nice and simple - it allows you to express your approval for a post when you don't have much to say about it in response, and people don't get butthurt over a positive point like they do over a negative one.

...Aren't illegal. They have a huge community surrounding them with many people that would gladly be active members on this site. I really don't understand the reasoning behind not allowing people to talk about these subjects - many equivalent websites dedicated to particular consoles allow this. This ban on talking about modding is turning people away from this site, and making it a less interesting place. I'm fine with us not being allowed to talk about things that are illegal (for example drugs, hacking) but please consider lifting this ban - or at least talk to us about it.

The reason for the ban on such subjects is because Nintendo and their third-party developers generally frown upon hacking/modding/homebrew in general, and openly allowing such discussion might give the site negative points in their books and scare off potential advertisers.

I'm willing to make a few concessions, though, because of our high search engine rankings and position as the world's largest Wii U community. I'll lift that rule for now, and we'll see what kinds of discussions crop up as a result. Any discussion of ROM's/images or piracy would still be a strict taboo - you'll have to keep it exclusively to homebrew.

For the time being, I agree. But once the Wii U comes out it will probably be the same as the 3DS Forums. Full of trolls and unfunny jokers wanting to get some likes by putting down the respected console.

(Not pointing any fingers or hating on the forums, mind you readers of this post)

Just saying, trolling and putting down a console would get you suspended or banned here.

so why not add more moderator's to keep a strict control over the conversation of grey area modding. i honestly beleive some things are worth discuss but eh i joined knowing what the rule's were so its understandable if they never change.

Only having one moderator on a forum with almost 1,500 people is pretty crazy to me though.

Of those 1500+ members, somewhere between 100-150 or so are actually active. With 100-200 posts per day, moderating this place should not require a large staff team.

Yesterday, I got a new server with CleverKite named Galaxy. MLP Forums, being the largest site I host, is already up and running on it. Today, I'll be moving Wii U Go and TheWiiU.com over to it as well. Expect some serious speed improvement once the move is complete.

Downtime will hopefully be under an hour, as I've set the TTL's on both sites' domains to 5 minutes, but don't be alarmed if the sites remain inaccessible for 48 hours.

If I make a countdown, I'll do it with Wii U Go's branding. It'll be hosted either on Wii U Go or a dedicated countdown domain (perhaps I'll make something similar to http://ponycountdown.com/).

I had a countdown timer counting down to Nintendo's E3 2011 presentation. I've been considering doing that again this year. Would you guys like that?

There is no built-in support for liking statuses in IP.Board. I installed a hook here last year that added a like feature to statuses, but it wasn't very well programmed and caused a lot of errors. I decided to remove it when IP.Board 3.2 came out and I upgraded the site to it.