Announcements & General InformationHere you can find out what the latest news Total Format has to offer is, what plans we have for the future as well as what's already been done. We will also post updates to the rules, competition info and stuff like that here too.
Firstly, it give me great pleasure to finally be able to welcome you all back to Total Format (again)...
I'm not going to bore you with all the details of the 1&1 situation that caused this downtime, suffice to say, TF is now on a really good server and as a result of some seriously vigorous testing, everything now seems to be running smoothly and in some parts far smoother than it has in the past.
Ok, so I presume you will want to know what has changed?
Well, pretty much every single part of the site and forum has been rebuilt again, so everything you see is fresh, recoded and reinstalled, but there are a few features that you will possibly recognise and a few you wont...
The best thing I can suggest is to take a while and explore the site. But suffice to say, the article section is now up and running, although a little shy regarding articles so far. TF now has a video sharing section that i've called TF Tube, where you can share videos from all your favourite video sites and as you will see there are a few other little forum features that will hopefully keep you amused for a bit.
Some minor forum features have been removed, but very few and nothing that was of any real importance. About the biggest instantly noticable removal is the chatroom. It was costing far too much for far too little usage, so it's been scrapped. The quick shout box is far easier to use and far easier to access and gives far less errors to people, although it is at the bottom on this forum and not the top like on the temp forum, as on TF it slowed down the loading of the main forum page too much being at the top of the page.
A heck of a lot of stuff has changed in the backend, but you don't need to worry about that, as it doesn't really effect you too much, but lots of things have been changed and a few things should feel a lot smoother to people.
The new RPG feature is still currently unavailable, simply because it is absolutely massive and the amount of work it requires is more than time allows at the moment. It will make a come back in the future, but for now it is considered on hold.
The biggest changes on the forum is the implementation of the latest version of the forum software, if you've been using the temp forum it will look and feel the same, if you haven't then you will quickly see that the new version offers far more uses and is smoother than before, you won't feel much difference from your side of things though. You'll see lots of little changes, but nothing too drastic.
I've done bug testing until i'm sick and tired of php code and html, but i've checked and double checked absolutely every single thing i could think of to try and make sure every single part of the site works proper, however, until the site is live and operating, it is impossible to be 100% sure i've caught every single one, so, if you find any bugs, please let me know and i'll get straight onto them to get them fixed.
I would like to apologise for the short delay in getting TF open, I had hoped TF would be live again far sooner than the 6 week mark, although I did say 6 weeks, so by rights it's only actually a couple of days later than i'd planned for. Finding nasty bugs and security flaws means they have to be fixed before I can put the site live though, otherwise i'd be putting TF and the communities security at risk and I won't ever do that.
A lot of the site has been cross checked with Firefox and IE 7 and as near as possible, things are working smoothly for both browsers, there are a couple of minor differences between viewing with the two browsers, but they are very minor, one thing being the fieldset (the box around signatures for example). If you spot anything major, please let me know.
I have a lot more features to put in place yet and they will start appearing over the coming weeks and months, but for a while TF is now what you see, the main thing for me to do now is the adding of content to the existing sections, while making sure I do everything possible to get TF heaving with members.
Check out your members page and update your profiles, that part of the site has been revamped, you can now customise your profile, have a youtube video in your profile and post visitor messages to peoples profiles and lots of other bits.
If anyone's critter died during the down time and you would like it ressurecting for you, please let me know and i'll arrange it, otherwise you can also ressurect your own pet at any point by visiting the graveyard.
Make sure you have a look at the frontpage of TF, the layout has changed a little bit.
Regarding the arcade... From now on the arcade will be limited to 500 games. Games will be rotated in and out depending upon the amount of plays a game has and how good stable the actual games are. This should hopefully keep content in the arcade fresh and should make the arcade a little more competitive, as well as lowering the resource use of the arcade by quite a bit.
I can't actually think of anything else off hand, but if anything comes to mind, i'll edit this post and add it here.
Anyway, let this announcement mark as a sign of reassurance to you once again, that TF has a very long and bright future ahead of it.
Welcome Back To The Real Total Format
Linear Mode
