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'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.

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!

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.

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).

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

CKEditor works best with pastes if you use one of the three paste buttons (in the red box):



They offer a variety of options for handling the formatting of the content. With that said, I'd advocate a simple link to the original source over reproducing the content, anyway.

This site is actually running on an older version of IP.Board, and a variety of changes have been made to the editor since then. I'll look into getting us upgraded, which might come with some improvements to direct pasting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This has been added.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.