You can always change it again?, actully I would wait till E3 just in case lol.

True... I'll just have to find an hour or two to do it.

Aww, come on. I designed Wii U Go's theme with the original teal colour. This small change suddenly made my site's entire design obsolete.

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.

Most people are too lazy/disorganised/dumb to access that, Nollog. It's a win for people like us who do use it, but you can't expect every forum goer to do the same.

That said, I agree with the TC. But we should only do it when it starts to really show.

Is it really that difficult to click the big "View New Content" button at the top of every page on the site?

I don't want to increase the number of topics shown in the sidebar hook in the interest of keeping the board index nice and clean. MLP Forums is about 25 times more active than TheWiiU.com, and having 5 topics in the sidebar hasn't been a problem for anyone.

IP.SEO has been screwing around. This should be fixed now. Please let me know if you come across any other "glitched" topics like that.

Don't forget that we're a Wii U forum first and foremost, not a Wii U chatroom. From a long-term point of view, it's better for the health and sustainability of the site to spend more time posting on the forums rather than pumping 40-character messages into the chatroom.

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.

I agree with you, Auzzie, that vague topic titles don't help anyone. They're not good for SEO, either, as search engines will be just as clueless over the meaning of "more news" as a member browsing the place.

The good news is, renaming topics is very easy. If you feel a topic's title should be modified, please file a report (and try to include a suggested replacement title with your report) and a mod will take a look.

Plus, people are now using the general discussion more for gaming topics even more.

People shouldn't be posting gaming topics in the general discussion section to begin with. Please report any such topics you see and they'll be moved to their proper place pronto.

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.

Your warning points are supposed to be between you and the staff only. Please do not openly discuss and compare how many you have.

As the OP's question has been answered, I'm going to lock this.

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.