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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 has been added.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.