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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

This has been added.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.