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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.