Probably not. Feld0 hosts this site using IP. Board, so I think we have to use the stock smileys.

IP.Board supports custom smileys, but someone will have to make them.

Of all the forum platforms out there, I'd go as far as to say IPB is actually the most customizable one. Also, I host on my own dedicated server...

Looks badass! Just one problem, the same one that Auzzie mentioned in a status update, those yellow jaggies need a smoothening.

Sorry for missing this. Unfortunately, there isn't much I can do about that. The appearance of that yellow curve is entirely up to your browser's rendering engine, and some browsers just do a better job of anti-aliasing it than others (that area of the skin is done purely in CSS code, with no images, to ensure it scales nicely to different browser windows and keeping page load times down).

From what I've seen, it looks significantly better in Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 10 than Chrome 24. The former two browsers also didn't have trouble rendering the non-standard font I initially put the theme up with.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you've also reverted to the previous font.

The font is currently set to Helvetica. If you're still seeing Montserrat (the one that Chrome didn't like), clear your cache.

Feld0, i've noticed that it doesn't do the border in threads...

Clear your cache. The same CSS file is used for the entire site.

Honestly, I wish the new theme went all the way down. It looks nice, but the abrupt stop kills it for me.

^ Yeah, that's what I've also said. It isn't flush, and both the checkered element and the banner element collide badly. Heck, even something as basic as a Wii U Blue border to give off the effect of a box art or something corny like that would break the elements nicely.

The feedback is appreciated.

I added a 6-pixel border to the bottom of the banner. You may need to do a hard refresh or clear your cache to see it. Does it look better?

The banner we have up top is mostly a placeholder - it's designed to be extremely easy to swap out, so I hope to get a new one put up there soon.

Putting a functional IP.Board theme together from Cerberus's and Keanu Riives's designs may look easy, but it came out to be a fairly challenging and quite time-consuming exercise in my CSS skills - the thing is, virtually nothing from the PSD's can be reused directly in the theme; everything has to be meticulously recreated in CSS.

This has been in the works more or less since Cerberus posted his first theme concept. Although there are still a few tweaks I'd like to make, I'm really glad to finally have a proper custom look for this place.

Neither MLP Forums nor TheWiiU.com is even near the ballpark of being profitable enough to justify separate hosting, or being placed on a DDoS-protected network. The dedicated box they currently share is already expensive enough as it is, and is powerful enough to absorb smaller attacks to some degree without going down completely. When it's not under attack (which, let's be honest, is almost all the time - attacks don't happen all that often), it's an incredibly fast server that can take thousands of users simultaneously.

DDoS attacks can happen to anyone; and considering how many Nintendo haters are out there, I would not rule out the possibility of a direct attack on TheWiiU.com at some point in the future. Separating the sites wouldn't do anything to make us DDoS-proof.

There was a server-wide DDoS attack today. I've been monitoring it all morning long, but it appears to have subsided now. I deployed what protection I could, but there's little that can really be done about such attacks effectively short of moving to a DDoS-protected network - and that's simply not possible from a financial perspective.

IP.Chat is a rather glitchy piece of work. It's hosted remotely on servers I don't control, and IPS are very slow with updates to it, so I'd attribute this to the software just not being quite up to par. Something we'll have to put up with, unfortunately, that is beyond my control.

I thought I had this set to something higher than 10.

Good suggestion. I went ahead and raised the limit to an unrealistically high number (unfortunately, IP.Board doesn't give me the option to remove the limit entirely).

There is an add-on available for IP.Board that adds "social groups" managed by members, but I really don't see the point of adding them. In my experience, such groups never get any significant amount of activity; and will do more to segregate and split apart the site's community than bring it together.

One creative group was the founding fathers on the 3DS forums. It was an invite only group that only allowed members that joined before a specific date, I think September 2010. Maybe we could have a group similar to that? Just a different time frame?

It's exactly things like these that I want to avoid. Being forever ineligible to be part of a group will inevitably cause members to feel excluded, as if they'll never have a chance of being part of "the club". It's difficult enough as it is to convince new members to an established forum that their contributions matter; social groups and cliques aren't going to help at all.

This is pretty exciting. Although we likely won't see the Linux version of the Steam client for a while, it's great to hear that Valve are actively working on porting it and the Source engine over. I have been considering a switch to Linux for some time; and although I'm aware that the vast majority of Steam's library won't be playable at launch, having the framework in place for Linux software delivery opens the door for developers to port their efforts over as well.

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.

Creating a good-looking custom theme isn't as simple as waving a stick. Back when David and I first agreed to share this forum between our blogs, we discussed hiring a professional designer and splitting the cost of getting a custom theme made. I haven't heard back on him on the matter since, however, so I've been considering designing a new theme myself. That's gonna take some time, however.

I don't really want to use a pre-made theme because I see them a lot on other sites and I want TheWiiU.com to look unique once we do get around to putting a fresh coat of paint on it. I'm financially able to purchase one, however, and it would be a much faster way to remodel the place than me making a theme myself.

Oh my.... I knew there were some pony fans on here but i didnt realize it was EVERYONE!... i stumbled across this when i saw the simpsons guy posting on a My Little Pony thread and though that looks strange and then I find 24 pages on my little pony O_o why are there so many guys watching this... i have this eerie feeling that the FBI is gonna bust down my door for being on some pedophile site... Why does everyone like Ponies???... You better not try to get me to conform... i shall not drink your pony cultist kool-aid!!!...


This is what I think of your precious Ponies

You think a 24-page thread is a lot? Try this place: http://mlpforums.com/

I....don't understand how this is serious. My little pony...like the commercials? "My little pony, My little pony". And what is a brony...a guy who likes my little pony? And a brony-dom, what? Maybe I signed up for the wrong place.

Yes, they are male adult fans of a mediocre kids show. Weird, huh. Try staying away from this thread.

Hey, I'm not an adult!

the only way to measure to truly prove which is powerful over another is a game looks better over each console for exacption Batman: Arkham City/ Armored Edition,

Even that isn't an accurate assessment of a console's power. Some developers are more experienced with one console than another and will thus be able to make a better-looking game on it.

The "Console A is X times more powerful than Console B" statement is a fallacy. While it is clearly possible to peg the Xbox 360 as more powerful than, say, the Nintendo 64, it is impossible to accurately quantify the actual difference in power in a single statement like that. There are far too many variables and differences both large and minute between most hardware systems to make such a comparison reliable.

There are times when such a comparison is possible - for instance, you can get a pretty good idea of just how much more powerful an Intel E5 processor is over an Intel E3 - but it gets increasingly more difficult to do so as the complexity of the hardware in question increases (comparing two CPU's is very different from comparing two complete consoles).

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.

I moved all of my sites to a bigger, faster, and cheaper server over the past couple of days or so. I expected the migration to go very smoothly, but a server-side analytics package created a number of unexpected issues with the process. We're now up and running on the new server, though - hope you enjoy the speed boost!

I just removed nine posts arguing over 9/11 in a feedback thread regarding the swear filter.

Please take it to a personal conversation, guys. I think this thread has served its purpose, so I'm gonna lock it.

It isn't impossible. It's a pretty straight forward modification of the php files.

When I used IP, I had to manually edit the php all the time.
If you don't update often it's a great solution, but if you like to keep stuff up to date as you should, it's painful.

Forums and other websites get cracked and broken into all the time. By far one of the most common reasons I see for such incidents is that the site owners were using an old version of their software in the interest of preventing anything from breaking. Given, IP.Board is much more secure than most forum platforms, but each update includes many useful bug fixes and sometimes a security fix as well, so I tend to prioritize the installation of updates.

The third generation of the IPS framework has a hooks system designed to avoid the pain of manual code edits, but creating a hook to override the default functionality of the swear filter would require a developer who is familiar with the platform (that is, if it is even possible to hook into the swear filter). There are also performance considerations to take into account as well, considering that IPB is designed to cache posts in fully rendered, raw HTML. If each user could choose whether to see a filtered or non-filtered version of a post, this would either require the system to be modified to cache two different copies of the post or posts would need to be parsed and filtered on-demand.

These are just a few considerations to keep in mind before I start hacking away at raw PHP.

Can all be fixed by putting a swear filter to on my default but alow each user to toggle it off like n GAF or others. But I get your point. It's just really weird to read random pony references in the middle of a sentence. It makes me stop and reread what was posted and I have to fill in the blanks on what the author said loo.

A per-user toggle is impossible with IP.Board's current design, unfortunately. That would indeed be a better solution.

Honestly, though, I'd rather you refrain from trying to swear to begin with. Then you'll avoid ever triggering the filter and getting confusing replacements made in the first place.

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.

Facebook reads every page that a like button is displayed on. There is a like button on every topic page, so Facebook reads the topic every time anyone opens it. Nothing to be concerned about, really.

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.