Alahmnat Posted June 8, 2021 Report Share Posted June 8, 2021 Shorah! It's been a while in the making, but as of 4:15 AM Pacific Time, we're officially up and running on the latest version of the Invision Community software, which is a huge update from the Invision Board software we had been running previously. There are still some visual quirks that need to be ironed out, particularly with the Jalak Games Directory, but those will be sorted over the next week or two. In the meantime, welcome to the new digs, and I hope you like what we've done with the place! (As a quick aside, despite the change in URL scheme for the old Archive content on this side of the site, I've made sure that links to those pages will still continue to redirect to the new MediaWiki Archive, because I strongly believe that treating link rot is important. And also it helps out search rankings to not have a ton of 404s out there.) New Features Gallery The Gallery is back! We've worked with Cyan to upload all of the concept art and design work for the Intangibles release last week, and we'll be working to expand the collection of material available for viewing to include the rest of Uru and the other Myst games. "In-cavern" images and artistic concept pieces should still be uploaded as needed to the wiki, but more technical works and other adjacent material can now be placed here for easier visibility and storage. Clubs A new feature of Invision Community is Clubs. You can use these to create your own smaller groups on the site, complete with a gallery, a club calendar, and a unique forum. We've also set up the main forum to show topics from the clubs you're a member of, so it's easier to keep tabs on what your clubs are up to. Now, if you have a guild or other in-cavern group that you want to operate, but don't want to run your own site or forum, you can set up shop with us! And speaking of forums… New Forum Layout We have a new "fluid" forum layout that shows all recent topics from all forums together in the same place. Given the general lack of activity here, it seemed like a better solution than keeping things separate. However, if you prefer the old layout, you can get it back by using the toggle button at the top of the forum index. Better Registration(?) One of the benefits of the new software is that we now have access to Invision Community's spam services. This should mean that we'll have fewer problems with spam registration, and we can undo some of the more convoluted steps to joining the community here. I'm going to let things run for a week or two to see how the service shakes out, but I'm hopeful that we can simplify things a bit for those who want to join us here. Future Projects Unified Forum/Wiki Accounts One of the other additional benefits to the upgrade is that it provides better support for connecting external accounts. I still have some research and testing to do on this front, but I do hope to be able to let people use a single account for both the community and the wiki, rather than needing separate accounts for each. Additional Storage The Gallery is the first step on the path to making the Guild of Archivists site the go-to resource for lore-related information of all kinds, and we're working with Cyan to establish a pipeline for releasing and storing that data here. One More Thing... I have a project in progress that will hopefully enable the Library to make its own triumphant return in the future. It's not quite ready for prime time yet, as it requires banging a few pieces of the software into a shape that they weren't quite designed to make on their own, but I think you'll all really enjoy it once it's finished. I'll hopefully have more to share on this project soon, so stay tuned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alahmnat Posted June 9, 2021 Author Report Share Posted June 9, 2021 Bonus new feature: night mode! Click here to turn it on for certain times of the day, or you can just change the theme using the "Theme" dropdown at the bottom of the page to keep it on permanently. Please be sure to report any issues you have with the dark mode theme in the Feedback forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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