Ok, just thought I'd give you guys some updates on the latest happenings here.
First off, if you haven't noticed, we've switched to the latest version of IPB. With that comes some additional user features, lots of security and anti-spam updates and misc. administrative stuff. Our Admin Control Panel has been practically completely rewritten and is much, much easier for us to use. Registration now has a captcha involved and allows us to let users openly register without admin approval. The board itself seems to be running much faster. All in all, it's a very worthwhile upgrade and I'm happy it went as it did.
I've also changed the default theme to a modification I did of the IP.Professional theme. I think it's a little cleaner for the boards and makes us look a little more professional. You guys are free to use any theme you like (use the dropdown at the bottom left to change it), but that's going to be the default one for guests and new users. If there are any huge objections let me know.
There is 1 outstanding issue left and it's out of my hands. The forums right now are in, well, 'forum'. This is a NFS issue that we had the 'priveledge' of finding for Ibiblio and they're doing their best to work on it. Basically I used the 'mv' command to move the testing forums from the 'forum' folder where I had been testing them back to 'forums'. This triggered some kind of bug and left us where we're at. They will eventually be moved back to the 'forums' folder, but I'm waiting on Ibiblio for everything. That's the only forum issue I know of right now.
The Wiki has also been upgraded to the latest MediaWiki version. I'm not going to claim to be any kind of expert in that area, but from what it seems it's good. With that I've also added 2 new admins to it: Meyer and Tux. They'll be overseeing the Wiki stuff and making sure things don't get out of hand. Right now I'm not sure if I want to integrate the user databases for the forum and the Wiki. I think it might be better to leave them separate in case we ever have to split the two up or something. I do intent to install a captcha for the Wiki registration and hopefully will get to that this weekend.
Outstanding issues for the Wiki are the captcha and it seems the image gallery is broken. Stuff that I'll look at this weekend.
Finally, we added a new user group in the Asia section. It's the Japanese User Group and is going to be watched over by Meyer. As we discussed in the initial thread, users are welcome to speak in Japanese or English in there. That goes for any of the user groups obviously. We're not about to dictate to you guys how you communicate. All we ask is that if something beneficial to the community happens, translate for rest of us
Thank you all for bearing with me as I do these upgrades. Hopefully things will be a smooth ride from here on out and we can get back to the normal routine around here.
Roy
OESF Admin Team
