Registration enhancements, new features, and upcoming activity

[Alahmnat]

Shorah!

As of this evening, we are once again running the latest version of Invision Community (4.6.6). With this upgrade, I've been able to re-streamline the registration process. New members will still have their content flagged for review if they meet certain spam thresholds during registration, but if you're here legitimately, you'll no longer have to deal with the clunky "post here first so we can approve you manually" rigmarole; your new account should Just Work.  (Lookit that old-school smiley-face, I've missed him...)

Additionally, this new version of Invision Community has introduced new features like badges and an overhauled ranks/reputation system. I don't want to gamify the community side of the site too extensively, and I'm not super huge on public "reputation" systems as a community-driven metric for determining member "quality", but I do want to play around with these new systems a little and see what can be done to personalize them for the community here. Basically, the implementation of these systems is still in flux while I feel them out, so if you see things changing between visits, that's what's up.

Finally, there's some big news on the infrastructure side of things here. As we announced a while back, Cyan has effectively adopted the Guild of Archivists as the official home for lore and community history for the Myst franchise. With that has come the decision to host the site on their servers to ensure its continuity in perpetuity. I'll still be in charge of running things around here, but Cyan will essentially be picking up the tab and providing anti-bus-factor defenses. Now that both Cyan and I have some mental bandwidth to deal with the transition process (and to be clear, the bottleneck there has been me, not them), I expect that to start happening relatively soon (like, in the next month or so). You shouldn't see any forward-facing changes, but there may be a brief window where things are offline while we roll everything over. You may also see some changes to the staff page as we work to bring on at least one of the Cyan folks as an admin here (again for bus-factor-related reasons).

Also, as part of this move, we're going to be sending out messages to folks who have previously registered and allowed us to contact them via email, letting them know that we're still here and open for business as a community hub. This will be one of the only times (if not THE only time) we've ever utilized this line of communication, and I promise we won't be using it to send you garbage on the reg going forward. It's just a one-time touch-point to see if there's anyone out in the wilderness who may be interested in checking back in. While Cyan had previously closed their own forums due to the amount of technical debt they had accumulated over the years, it's my intention to keep the forums and other Invision-powered elements of this site intact for the extended foreseeable future. On top of some of the other things I've either already built (like the Jalak Game Directory) or still have in the works (like [REDACTED]), I still feel like forums are a valuable resource for every community and fill a need that places like Discord simply aren't designed to accommodate, and the Myst community has been without one of those for some time now.

Anyway, that's the latest. Now I need to go fall over so I can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at work tomorrow. Take care and stay safe, all!