Essential Maintainance & Upgrades

[Detomah]

Just a quicky to let everyone know, that at some point this evening I shall be taking TF offline for a few hours to perform some essential maintainance and upgrades.

Not much will change that will be noticed by front end users in honesty, this is more of a security and general maintainance update than features update.

The site is likely to be offline between 6 and 12 hours, depending on how smoothly the work goes, therefore, if I take the site offline around 9-10 PM tonight, it should be back online by breakfast time.

Once this set of work is done successfully, work will then commence on some of the many features that have been requested, changes that have been planned for a while and various new little bits that have been mentioned since the server move a couple of months ago.

Premium accounts are not likely to make an appearance until I have moved house though, as the work required to implement that fully is far greater than I can currently commit the time for, so that is still likely to be at least 8 weeks away.

As was mentioned in a thread yesterday, I will try to implement the new TF chess feature before the end of this week too, as well as reintroducing a couple of the other games that were removed during the server move.

As was requested by Pura, I will also take a very close look at the Karma system, to see what possibilities there are for tweaking the system.

At some point over the coming days, a full review of TFs current rules and setup will also begin, because I am aware that over the last 4 years, but mainly during the QGO era, the purpose of TF meandered away from what I always wanted to achieve with this site and it is something I want to address as soon as possible. The idea was never to let any 3rd party dictate how I did things, but somewhere along the lines, I may have lost sight of that.

I am open for any input anyone feels like throwing my way as to how you feel TF could be improved, however, I don't want critism and abuse, that will not help to make things better and is not what is needed right now. What I would like is positive comments and suggestions please.

For example...

What would inspire you to use the website part of TF?
Do you have difficulty finding certain features?
Do you not know how to use certain features?
Do you find the layout confusing?
What do you feel TFs current main focus is, in the sites current state?
Would you use TF Radio?
Would you download legal MP3s from TF for a small fee?
If TF had a proper video upload channel like YouTube, would you upload videos to it?
Would it be worth TF implementing a TeamSpeak channel?
What would it take to get people commenting on photos in the gallery?
What would it take to get people to actually start using the TF Gallery instead of 3rd party image upload sites?

Use your imagination. It's your home, I make it for you too and not just for me.

If you want it and it's a feasible and practical idea, I can implement it, but I need to know what you want before I can do so.

Also please do not ask for banned members to be reinstated, becuase even though I want to improve things, they were banned for good reason and that hasn't changed.

[Detomah]

30 min notice to shutdown.

[Detomah]

Maintainance completed successfully.

Should anyone encounter any bugs or issues, please report them to the bug section, so I can fix them as soon as possible.

Further maintainance may be required at some point in the next couple of days to implement a few of the new bits I have planned, but as always, notice will be given in advance.

Please note that the Karma system has been tweaked, so if your wondering why your karma has gone down, it's because everybodies has to come into line with the tweaks, nobody has had any karma removed though, it's just the values given out that have been adjusted, which have obviously been reflected in everyones total karma points level.

Also, you may notice that the new posts search has also been brought into line with more modern techniques. It may take a little getting used to, but it is a much better mothod, so I ask you to give it time.