Major Forums Upgrade

[SaintLuther]

Forums Upgrade 2018

Over the past couple months the forums have been rebuilt from the ground up to achieve several goals:

• Updating the base software for improved security and features
  
• Making future upgrades and additions significantly easier
  
• Maintaining the current theme while making improvements to it where needed
  

A non-exhaustive list of changes and improvements to the forum are as follows:

• Latest version of forum software now being used
  • We previously had a nearly 2 year old version with many security vulnerabilities
    
• Forums are fully encrypted
  • All connections to the forums are encrypted, end-to-end
    
  • Non encrypted connections are not allowed
    
  • Insecure image embeds in posts have been converted to links to maintain full encryption (they will be converted to secure embeds where possible)
    
  • The FBI can't track your forums activity anymore
    
• Theme improvements
  • Many minor improvements to HTML DOM and CSS have been made
    
  • Style of the forums doesn't break at weird resolutions
    
  • Looks more consistent on mobile (although still needs a lot of work)
    
  • Scrollbar disappears when not needed (Although rare, the scrollbar would stick around when there was nothing to scroll)
    
  • Static images are cached for a much longer time, making browsing much smoother
    
• Chatbox improvements
  • You can now click smilies and have them directly inserted into chat
    
  • You can scroll down in chat infinitely.. no more 50 message limit
    
  • Unread chatbox messages are marked
    
• Automention improvements
  • Should now work everywhere. Chatbox, posts, comments, etc...
    
  • See a preview of the user's avatar who you are mentioning
    
  • Optionally mention users based on their ID so if their name changes, the mention will also
    
• Username style improvements
  • Usernames should be styled properly in many more places including "newest member" and the welcome block in the top right.
    
• Improved thanks system
  • You can now thank and unthank posts
    
  • List of users who thanked a post look much nicer
    
  • View how many unique posts a user has been thanked for
    
  • About 300 reputations (mostly negative and for @Cactus) have been removed because they conflicted with this new system
    
• Avatar Changes
  • About 1600 avatars have been added to the gallery
    
  • Upload limit has been increased to 256KiB
    
  • Maximum resolution set to 128x128
    
  • Remote avatars are not allowed (images from imgur, etc.) for security and performance reasons
    
• User/Profile improvements
  • Overall, user profiles have a nicer layout
    
  • View a list of the user's referrals
    
  • View a list of posts they have been thanked for
    
  • View a list of posts they have thanked
    
  • This should go without saying, but the buddy list isn't broken af anymore
    
  • Signature tab hidden if they don't have one
    
  • Ability to change profile privacy settings
    
  • Same comment moderation system
    
  • View a list of other user's warnings
    
  • Cost of name changes goes up 10k each time (instead of a flat 50k). First one is free
    
  • Steam ID is synchronized and cannot be changed yourself
    
  • Added reputation levels
    
  • The signature of banned users now displays their ban reason and duration
    
• Forum, thread, and post improvements
  • When you have read everything in a subforum, the parent forum will also be marked as read if there aren't other unread subforums/threads
    
  • More information is displayed at the top of threads like users currently viewing it, total views, and replies
    
  • Added fast quote. Highlight a section of a user's post then select the fast quote button (next to reply) to only quote that section of a user's post.
    
  • If a user was warned for a post, a red banner will display the reason and warning level given for it
    
  • A better spoiler tag
    
  • No more thread ratings (really pointless before)
    
  • Reputation level displayed in author area
    

Discuss these changes on the changelog here.