September 2nd Release Notes

Things have been a bit hectic this week. With everyone running around post-pax, excitment levels have been high! I almost forgot that you all deserve to know what went into the build this week.

Guild Hosting Enhancements/Changes

1. Inactive guilds that conflicted with active members were contacted via email to the leader and asked to change their sub domain name via a form.
2. Sci-fi borders hover over galactic planetscapes in our new Clan Nebula theme. This theme uses a random background image that you can replace with up to three of your own. Just check in the advanced settings to change these images and the background colors to match them.
3. We replaced the included vBulletin editor on the guild sites with TinyMCE rich text editor. This will prevent the common javascript errors that were caused by including the vBulletin functionality and also give us flexibility to improve the editor outside the vBulletin environment with AJAX plugins and other improvements. There has been mixed feedback, and we are working through some issues, but this was a neccessary change to solve many lingering bugs. If there are TINYMCE plugins or enhancements you would like, let us know!
4. Fixed an issue where warhammer theme styles were conflicting with the editor.
5. Fixed an issue where guild image gallery was only showing 25 images. Bumped that by a factor of 10.
6. The guild invite PM’s were coming from GuildCafe bot… they now come from the guild leader.
7. Fixed an issue that was causing duplicate posts when previewing them. The preview should now behave correctly.
8. Made some fixes to the formatting on the guild recruitment management tab to make the Recruiting application questions easier to see and understand.

Member Profile Enhancements/Changes

1. The spacing/padding/design of the profile image gallery page has been cleaned up so that it is more uniform and not subject to all sorts of wrapping issues.
2. Made some changes to the challenge pages to handle non-logged in users correctly.
3. Cleaned up some padding on text buttons so they don’t wrap.
4. Fixed a typo in the character pane of the DNA Panel

General Enhancements/Changes

1. Made some performance improvements to the homepage by removing over 40 roundtrips to the server.
2. Changed how we handle DB connections so this should show up as a nice speed boost on the site.
3. Rename the nav bar GUILDS to be GROUPS in keeping with the wording change to the hosting sections, the search, and other navigation.
4. We are now logging traffic to all signature files used so we can see who is sending the most traffic. We are working on a reward system to recognize people who post their quiz result badges in their signatures on other sites and regularly drive lots of new members.
5. A simple search was created as the Solr and other full text solutions required too much architecture work that we do not have the time or resources for. This search runs across all of the primary content types in the site. Gamers, games, groups, AKAs, characters, and images.
6. Added the quizzes as a drop down in the main site nav.
7. Removed a link that was causing memory leak issues in vBulletin.
8. Fixed some typo issues in the RTS quiz.
9. Created a gamerDNA feedburner account so that we can accept email subscriptions to our company blog. (look in the right column)

That is it for now… it was a pretty light week as we continue to crank behind the scenes on some new designs… and the roll out of our OpenID system.

Speaking of OpenID it is worth going back and reading the post that Imran made about the steps we are going through to prepare for it. You might be contacted to change your name to remove conflicts with active guilds if you are an inactive or semi-inactive member. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we have to kick this thing out and we have to get the name conflicts cleared up! As always we are open to feedback!