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 added Keanu's icons today. Sorry for the delay, but special thanks to him for making the set.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

There's a little "Report" button on every single post that exists precisely for this purpose. I suggest using it if you come across spam or any other content that really doesn't need to be there.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?