Forum improvements and changes log

[Dae]

Forum improvements and changes log

Since 19-12-04 we're going to start reporting changes made to forum here, in this topic. This topic is open for moderators only, so if you want to comment some of the changes you can always create a topic in "site and forum questions" room and sure we will see and answer your comment.
For admins/moderators, who want to post here an improvement - please, follow the common template of posting in this topic.

<center>
·Alpha·
Wishing you Happy Posting</center>

[Dae]

19-12-04 // Attachment mod is installed

I have just installed Attachment mod, as you already may know by other topics on the forum. Attachment mod allows visitors to upload images and any other files, to attach them to a message. It automatically displays images and places the link to the uploaded object on the server (if it isn't an image, of course). Please, report bugs and suggestions about the mod to this topic. Expect more mods to be installed soon.

[James]

20-12-04 // Updated forum rules

Updated forum rules. Basically simplified it and put in and rules about the correct way we want you to use the attachment mod.

[Dae]

20-12-04 // Avatar size limits

Changed limits to avatar sizes from 200 x 200 to 150 x 150. Actually, 150 x 150 is still really big one, so I recommend starting using ones that are even less than 100. All information about your personality and hobbies you may express in a signature so there is no need to make your avatar big in same time. When you upload or give a link to avatar, please, make sure it is less than 20 kbytes because we can't forget that there are poor dial up'ers (who are still humans and who want to have fun and post as much as others do...). Thank You!

[Dae]

20-12-04 // Spam bot protection added

Spambot is a robot, basically a program that scans all the pages in the internet and searches for @ symbol and e-mail addresses. That's why you may recieve a lot of spam. Spam is a mail message, often - with adverts, which you didn't expect and want to recieve. Most of people recieve spam every day, every hour and every minute, loads of messages which waste their time and traffic, unless person owns @hotmail/msn.com or like this accounts ran by respectable owners, which, by the way, waste millions of dollars to make a protection which isn't perfect too because sometime it may kill a non-spam message...
Since now, on this forum, you may feel free to post your e-mail addresses and I'm sure that a spambot will not add your e-mail into a list because a link is now obscured in a code of each page, while actually it should look as usual in your browser.

[Dae]

20-01-05 // Forum folder aliases added

I've added some aliases to our forum folder. By default it keeps being http://www.dxalpha.com/forum but /FORUM, or /forums, or /Forums (like AK forum), or /board (like DEA forum), or /f0rum (for 313373s ) and etc. will take user to our forum too.

[Dae]

20-01-05 // Floodbot protection added (messaging)

Floodbot (a bot that "attacks" a certain site with flooding database with messages) protection now works fine. A chance of flooding our forum by floodbot now tends to zero. But there is a little problem: if you typed a message too quickly, by clicking submit it may give you a preview page instead. In this case, click submit again in 3-5 seconds.

[Dae]

26-01-05 // Floodbot protection added (registering)

Floodbot (a bot that "attacks" a certain forum with flooding the database with loads of useless information) protection (on registering) has been added 1 minute ago. This is a vulnerability and the way how this forum has been attacked on the past weekends. Now, I officially declare that team NGH sucks with their primitive methods of attacking. Guys, get brains.
I want to say thank you to Mahou, who was patiently removing consequences of two attacks and Alex, who was trying to defend the forum during the first attack of NGH. Thank You!

Added by Mahou: Jay & Bobo helped out a lot too! Cheers all and to Dae.

[Dae]

29-01-05 // [A]lliance clan calendar added

I've just installed a calendar mod to our forum. It is useful for forgetful (and others too ) people in our clan, especially now, when events started appearing more frequently because of the warring activity raise.
You can access the clan calendar by this link.

[Dae]

07-02-05 // Forum hacker attack 3?

I'm apologising for a prolonged forum downtime (probably, this morning [GMT]). We're not the only one, you can see that phpbb.com, the home of the phpBB forum got attacked too and as far as i know, more seriously:

At present http://www.phpbb.com is offline due to a group of politically motivated hackers wishing to use an opensource project to push their agenda ... shame on them.
<...>
Other sites were attacked at the same time as http://www.phpbb.com by the same group displaying the same information and in these cases the same third party application has been suggested as the common factor (thus far).

Good luck to phpBB team! We hope that this little worries will not affect their truly great deed with the development of Olympus/phpBB!

[Dae]

17-03-05 // Forum hacker attack 4 and news

I'm apologising for a prolonged forum downtime (now this were about week and half). You may know, we make back-ups of our database nearly every day (and we dare to say that this forum is the safest forum in Deus Ex community), so, the detriment in case with information was minimal, but detriment to forum popularity is unfortunately giant.
I'd like to clarify the event. First of all, there is a certain evidence that our forum got hacked. How could this happen we don't know, because by the time it got hacked, the forum had all the upgrades/updates ever released. phpBB team didn't give some certain comments of our case. Anyway, now we are making a backup of database twice or, at least, once a day plus our hosting provider guarantees 5 time a day backuping. It's unfortunately doubtful and we will not take this in account.
Second, we don't know who did this and we have no idea. This is most likely a person who is not related to Deus Ex community at all, he or she is interested in just having fun of messing with information but doubtfully interested in doing a damage to the clan.
Third, the restoration process was so long because of our lazy hoster. In the first answer to our request they offered us that they were going to do everything in near future but nothing happened and only in 3 days after this we recieved a weird mail that they had finally managed to open the log files and declared that the hack was their fault, but not ours. Our countless requests about restoring the database were ignored as in e-mails as in MSN. When we finally achieved their (and of course their management's) attention to the problem they cut short that our file is "corrupted" and that it is completely impossible to fix. In this case phpBB team wisely advised to split our 31 mb database into 100-150 kb pieces which was a complete madness because this process was very routine and took 4-5 hours which were spent in countless mouseclicks but it was the only way since hoster is so lazy to solve all the technical problems related to their software by themselves. Only in 2 days after we sent parts hoster did a restore. I noticed that they had never seen such method of solving such kind of problems. Anyway, I'm very, very happy that my lovely cyber home is back.
And also I'd like to accentuate that it is very doubtful that it is phpBB's fault, bug. It's most likely something related to our glitchy hoster (we are going to change it very soon, don't worry).
And returning back to the topic, fourth thing. Expect new mods, updates, upgrades in near future. Yes, Manstone.net server is temporarily down (and no, it is not related to this forum downfall) so the DX Archive is offline but we're expecting it to be back soon.
And the last thing, a little offtopic, - because of such prolonged forum downtime [A] lost it's "creames of society". Well, of course, it is a big trouble for us as for clan, but anyway we're wishing a good luck to them all and especially to [F]orce clan where most of them are now. I'm really sorry for my too expressive comments about this situation in [A] Head Quarters forum (private). I hope, you understand me and my feelings. Sorry.

[Dae]

31-03-05 // A very tiny addition: strikethrough
You now may use <s>strikethrough</s> in your posts. It can be done via

Code: Select all

<s> and </s>

tags. Don't forget to enable HTML in options (under the 'message body' text field). Happy striking throught!

[Dae]

08-04-05 // User cleaning
I've just cleaned the user list, deleted inactive, some zero-post (except 'MaceWindy' account which is a sight of our forum), duplicated accounts, n00b accounts (like: "fuck_alpha") and so on.

[Dae]

08-04-05 // Disabling avatars and signatures option
There are complains that users of our forum use too big avatars and signatures which are big as by file weight, as by their real sizes. Since now, users who are not interested in watching avatars and signatures can disable them in their profiles and enjoy the light weight pages. This is more than actual now because everybody starts using X-Fire signatures which cannot be cached since they're dynamic.
And the second thing, the max signature size (in sum) is 130 kb. The max avatar size is 50 kb. Theres no mod that could control this automatically so, admins, please, keep an eye on users!
Why do we care about sizes so much? We shouldn't forget that there are poor fellows with limited traffic like me and there are 56kers who have to wait a lot. I'd better disable signatures but start posting more. Hope you understand.

[James]

18-04-05 // Disabling guests from posting replies, threads and attachments
Well as you can see from the title, hehe.
They can still view mod forums, but can't post those attachments still. ^_~
Thanks Dogny, kthxowned.

[James]

19-04-05 // Disallowed attachments by normal users
Moderators can still upload.
Dog.ny mode.

[James]

21-04-05 // A very tiny addition: blink
You now may use blink ablitity in your posts. It can be done via

Code: Select all

<blink> and </blink>

tags. Don't forget to enable HTML in options (under the 'message body' text field). <blink>Happy epilipsie sizures!</blink>

[Dae]

28-04-05 // Few updates and upgrades

• Forum is finally upgraded and possible we fixed a "too many connections" bug/error
• Uninstalled annoying antispam "preview" mod.
• Uninstalled calendar mod since there is no use for it. We can get it back anytime.
• All users including guests now see HTML tags in messages and have it turned on by default (was a bug)
• Updated moderators area and moved it to another category.

Permission related changes:

• Guests now can browse and read, but can't post new topics and reply in all the rooms. They have to register.
• Only journal keepers can create a new topic now in their journals.
• Attachment posting for normal users is now enabled again.

Todo list (soon):

• Disk limit for attachments going to be switched to 100 mb (+bonus).
• Quick reply mod installation.
• Numerous ranks mod installation.

More to come

[Dae]

26-07-05 // No more quotas
Good news - no more disk quotas for attachment mod so you can post now any file you want! Thanks to Darren for buying us loads of disk space for this. The only limitation is that you cannot post illegal content. More about this here: http://www.dxalpha.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=79516#79516
Also, bad news. I'm taking down City project by several reasons. Anyway never say never, i don't except that it is going to be continued. In case if we continue it, we will not announce this.

[Dae]

31-07-05 // Known problems
Unfortunately, our host has some technical problems and from time to time people are unable to see topics with polls, also to upload attachments and to upload avatars on the forum.
It you happen to see these errors ("SQL errors"), please, do a good turn to us with posting a new topic in "Site and forum questions" room with error details. This would very helpful for us!
Also today I've managed to fix all the known security holes and bugs and corrected [RELEASE] topics

[Dae]

01-08-05 // Forum clean up
It's about time for us to clean this forum up. We will be doing this step by step, a minima ad maximis. It looks more like a game: we announce a rule in this topic and you have to obey it. But we will be unfairly harsh to everyone who doesn't follow this rule and rules posted in the past.
The first rule is about signatures.

• The summary size of images in your forum signature should be equal or less than 150 KBs.
• Your signature should not contain more than 2 images.
• Each image should not be more than 600 pixels in width and 200 pixels in height.
• Your signature should not contain more than 3 lines. See, what I mean:
  
  - this is clear and shiny example of a signature with 3 lines: 2 text lines and 1 image.

You have 48 hours to check your signature.

[Dae]

07-08-05 // Server move
I'm very sorry for the huge amount of downtime of our forum but we were forced to close it because our hoster had been moving to faster servers and faster connection. As for me, the forum now works like two times faster than before.

[Dae]

13-08-05 // Spam
A step two in our forum 'clean up'.

Any topic with spam posts will be splitted and moved to trash without notice.

So you may not bother yourself with posting spam anymore

[Dae]

21-08-05 // Lags
Yes I know that the page doesn't load sometimes and it says "dxalpha.com was not found", or 'submit' button doesn't work or you can't download file. This lag/disconnection issue is going to be solved within this week.

[Dae]

28-08-05 // Coppa agreement removed
Coppa agreement on registration got removed.
If you have any complaints/comments, mail or PM me.

[Dae]

15-09-05 // Hoster moves the server
Our hoster, CollateralFx, will move the server in about 3 days. After the movement the sudden disconnection issue will not disturb us anymore, plus, the connection speed will be increased by 2 times. During this movement, no downtime expected.

[Dae]

19-09-05 // Hoster has moved the server
The server has been successfully moved. Unfortunately, there was a huge downtime, mainly because DNSs around the world cannot be updated so quickly as we wanted to. So, for example, visitors from USA/Canada could see our forum starting from the middle of yesterday, and I've managed to get in our site only today morning.
And If it's possible for you, please, tell us about the changes you've noticed so far.