...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.

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.

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.

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.

An arcade would necessitate an additional staff commitment to maintain properly, and to top off, isn't something I really see being all that beneficial to the goal of TheWiiU.com to be a discussion forum. In a time when the staff power around here seems to be going missing in action, it's not a terribly smart idea to add additional burdens when the existing responsibilities aren't being attended to properly.

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.

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.

IP.Chat isn't exactly known for being reliable. If you get kicked out for inactivity, just hop back in. Unfortunately, there isn't much more that can be done about it because it doesn't run on servers I control.

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.

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.

Facebook reads every page that a like button is displayed on. There is a like button on every topic page, so Facebook reads the topic every time anyone opens it. Nothing to be concerned about, really.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.