Feld0

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a new blue name joining our ranks.

 

That's right, Mournblade is our newly promoted community admin! Give him a nice handshake before he flees in horror from 14,500 pages of chat logs.

 

The recent issues with inconsistent staffing called for some changes, and Mournblade has proven himself more than capable of managing a community at a higher level than merely cleaning up after the messes as a moderator. As an administrator, he'll now work alongside me in appointing new staff, adapting the forums' layout to the needs of the community, maintaining rulesets, and simpler things like changing up the banner from time to time, in addition to his previous duties.

 

With new forces in TheWiiU.com's administration, we're now in a good position to roll out a number of changes we've been planning for a while to make this community a better place for everyone.

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 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.

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.