Guild Launch News
RELEASED - Guild Launch Version 2.0
Guild Launch Version 2.0 Has Been Released This Morning - July 30th, 2007
NOTE: There have been changes made to avatars, please read the very bottom of this post.
We've been quite busy over the last few weeks adding some much requested features and fixing a host of small bugs that have been like a pebble in our shoe. This release represents a considerable stabilizing release and adds some key features.
We know that many people have a favorite feature they want added and I assure that if we've told you it is coming, then it is on the horizon. However, I hope you will agree with me and the team that this release represents significant improvements to the system.
Change Notes
This feature list is not 100% complete yet, but this is the bulk of the features.
(HOTFIXED) Means the fix or change is already on the live site.
Featured Guild Sites
- Ashes of Numenor has been added as a featured guild: http://aon.guildlaunch.com/
- Seraphim has been added as a featured guild: http://www.seraphim-guild.net/
Major Features
Ban Users
- Added ability to ban a user. You can get to the ban page by going to Admin->Permissions "Ban Users" link on left side. This ban is complete. If the user tries to access your site they will receive a message stating 'You have been banned.'
Guild Only Content Options
- Added the ability to make content areas guild only. can be set on Rapid Raid, Forums, Roster, Image and File Library, Calendar Events, Guild Bank, Custom Pages, PvP area and Guild Progression. The feature is accessed by going to Admin->Permission and clicking on the "configure" link on left under the "Member only Content" heading. All content is publicly viewable by default.
Lord of the Rings Itemstats
- Added Lord of the Rings Online itemstats. The itemstats will work just like the World of Warcraft ones. The data is retrieved from http://lotro.warcry.com/
Block Sender in PMs
- Added the ability to block a user from sending you PMs
Report PMs
- Added the ability to report a PM to the Guild Launch support staff. We will ban the user site wide if the infraction warrants it.
User Shoutbox
- A "Shoutbox" or "Wall" has been added to the user profile page. Now your friends can drop in and leave you a message.
Avatar Improvements
- 60x60 version of avatars are now displayed on the sidebar shoutbox and on the user shoutbox, you will need to reupload your avatar to get a 60x60 version created.
Security and Action Auditing
- We've added auditing to certain site features. For now, this ability will be used by our support staff to track certain actions performed by users. We will also be using this to track attempts by users to perform actions they shouldn't.
Essentially, when our system says "You can't do that." we will track information about who tried to perform the action. In addition, when certain sensitive operations are performed and the user is authorized we will audit it also so the system knows who performed the action. This will help us long term with accountability and security of the system.
In the long term this could be used by a guild master to audit actions performed by their site admins. This feature will be added at a later date after we observe the signal to noise ratio created by the auditing we have in place.
None of the information is in any way related or used in our advertising/marketing efforts. This is purely a security and site quality measure. This is not a "big brother" type of thing, if a problem occurs we will use these logs to help assess the cause.
Templates
- Added the "Clean Default" template. This template is a very stripped down "see through" template that should allow our users a good pppurtunity to create some nice background effects. This template is reminiscent of a blog template and is stylistically very different from our existing templates.
Enhancements
- The "Last Forum Post" widget now shows the most recent posts not topics. In addition, the posts shown are based on the user's security settings.
- Added alternating colors to admin Member and Character list
- Modified a users post stats to show their total posts on all of guild launch and to provide more detailed statistics relating to the guild they are in.
- Added ability to reset your own post count if it gets out of sync with your actual post count. typically this is evident by a post count in the billions. Users can find this by clicking the "Update Post Count" button at the bottom of their user page.
- Changed phpBB session handling so that users should not get the invalid session error, or should get it significantly less or only in cases where it is actually appropriate.
- Profile Avatars (Images) will now be resized into 3 sizes. Tiny (60x60) Medium 100x100 and Large (250x250). The Medium will be used in the forums. The large will be used on the user page and the tiny is used in places like the shoutbox.
- Indication of historical rapid raid data. Rapid Raid stores data for characters who have raid data even if they have been removed from the guild. These characters are now marked with an asterisks on the Raid Details page in the attendees section and on the Events page. This should help you determine which characters are there for historical purposes and assist in removing extra characters if they are created.
- When a user selects their guild in the Guild Roster search page, they will now only receive results relating to their guild. If the item you searched for is not there, you will not receive results form other guilds but will instead receive no results.
- The user profile landing page has been reorganized. The page flows a bit better now and is easier to read.
- The "back to Guild" link has been removed from the right side of the header in admin and has been replaced by a linked guild name in the upper black bar. This was done to be more consistent with items like the "Admin" link and to make the view cleaner. In addition, the word "Guild Launch" have been removed from the logo on the top left of the admin site. We believe you know where you are... most days.
- Added a search widget that will let you search your site with Google.
- Performance on the main tab and the Characters tab of user profiles should be much better for people with alot of characters or many guilds.
Bug Fixes
- An issue where email addresses would not be fully updated when a user changed their email address has been resolved.
- An issue where errors would be encountered or the sorting would be incorrect when moving around widget in the Sidebar Widgets page in admin has been resolved.
-Email notifications for replies to posts will now have the correct server reference so you can click on the email link and be taken to the post.
-Fixed language on the forum authorization page to be more clear.
-Fixed issue which would not allow a user to change the case of their forum handle. (HOTFIXED)
-Fixed a security issue where a person given member privileges could elevate themselves to a site admin. This can no longer be done.
-Fixed description of site admin to note that a site admin "cannot" delete the guild. The previous language said they could even though the system actually wouldn't let them.
-Fixed certain queries that were taking too long to execute. The effect isn't visible, but should make the system more performant.
-An improper permissions setting which might allow an unauthorized user to manipulate a guild site's linkbox was fixed. (HOTFIXED)
-A rapid raid item details link that was broken has been fixed
-Visual issues with quote displays in signup have been fixed (HOTFIXED)
- 404 errors when importing profiles should now be a thing of the past (HOTFIXED)
- The guild roster will no longer blowout when an Armory import with more than 20 or so characters is performed.
- An issue with guild plans getting out of whack when a guild was upgraded has been resolved
- An issue which was causing cached account information to not refresh when a person confirmed their account has been resolved.
- An issue that did not correctly increment the guild masters post count when an application post was made has been fixed. This should reduce the occurrence of post counts becoming incorrect.
- An issue was fixed where the background image would not be correctly applied in certain templates. (HOTFIXED)
Advertising
- The advertising server has been moved to new hardware. This should increase the performance of Ad-Supported sites slightly, but will provide much more room for growth.
Signature Generator
- Appropriate avatars for LOTRO and Guild Wars have been added to the signature generator. http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/
Performance
- Over the last few weeks and in this release continued performance improvements have been made. (Some HOTFIXED)
- Certain information regarding guilds is now cached. This has reduced database calls to the database server and should improve
performance on a few of the user profile pages.
Miscellaneous
- A few "nofollow" and other robots.txt hints have been added to decrease the effect of Google and other bots indexing the guild sites. The search bots were previously indexing quite few pages that had very little content that was useful to be indexed.
Pardon Our Dust: Avatar Changes
Avatars are now resized on upload. We are currently displaying your previous unresized avatar on your profile page, but you will not have a forum avatar until you reupload the avatar from your user page. In addition, some animated gifs will no longer display and some transparent gifs might get changed. We feel these changes are important long term even if a little unsettling for our users. We appreciate your working with us while we transition.
To do this: Right click the existing one, click "Save Picture As" and save the picture to your desktop. You can then reload the avatar.
The old user page avatar will remain for a short while (a few days) and will then be replaced by the new resized one. Your forum avatar and shoutbox avatar will appear immediately.
NOTE: There have been changes made to avatars, please read the very bottom of this post.
We've been quite busy over the last few weeks adding some much requested features and fixing a host of small bugs that have been like a pebble in our shoe. This release represents a considerable stabilizing release and adds some key features.
We know that many people have a favorite feature they want added and I assure that if we've told you it is coming, then it is on the horizon. However, I hope you will agree with me and the team that this release represents significant improvements to the system.
Change Notes
This feature list is not 100% complete yet, but this is the bulk of the features.
(HOTFIXED) Means the fix or change is already on the live site.
Featured Guild Sites
- Ashes of Numenor has been added as a featured guild: http://aon.guildlaunch.com/
- Seraphim has been added as a featured guild: http://www.seraphim-guild.net/
Major Features
Ban Users
- Added ability to ban a user. You can get to the ban page by going to Admin->Permissions "Ban Users" link on left side. This ban is complete. If the user tries to access your site they will receive a message stating 'You have been banned.'
Guild Only Content Options
- Added the ability to make content areas guild only. can be set on Rapid Raid, Forums, Roster, Image and File Library, Calendar Events, Guild Bank, Custom Pages, PvP area and Guild Progression. The feature is accessed by going to Admin->Permission and clicking on the "configure" link on left under the "Member only Content" heading. All content is publicly viewable by default.
Lord of the Rings Itemstats
- Added Lord of the Rings Online itemstats. The itemstats will work just like the World of Warcraft ones. The data is retrieved from http://lotro.warcry.com/
Block Sender in PMs
- Added the ability to block a user from sending you PMs
Report PMs
- Added the ability to report a PM to the Guild Launch support staff. We will ban the user site wide if the infraction warrants it.
User Shoutbox
- A "Shoutbox" or "Wall" has been added to the user profile page. Now your friends can drop in and leave you a message.
Avatar Improvements
- 60x60 version of avatars are now displayed on the sidebar shoutbox and on the user shoutbox, you will need to reupload your avatar to get a 60x60 version created.
Security and Action Auditing
- We've added auditing to certain site features. For now, this ability will be used by our support staff to track certain actions performed by users. We will also be using this to track attempts by users to perform actions they shouldn't.
Essentially, when our system says "You can't do that." we will track information about who tried to perform the action. In addition, when certain sensitive operations are performed and the user is authorized we will audit it also so the system knows who performed the action. This will help us long term with accountability and security of the system.
In the long term this could be used by a guild master to audit actions performed by their site admins. This feature will be added at a later date after we observe the signal to noise ratio created by the auditing we have in place.
None of the information is in any way related or used in our advertising/marketing efforts. This is purely a security and site quality measure. This is not a "big brother" type of thing, if a problem occurs we will use these logs to help assess the cause.
Templates
- Added the "Clean Default" template. This template is a very stripped down "see through" template that should allow our users a good pppurtunity to create some nice background effects. This template is reminiscent of a blog template and is stylistically very different from our existing templates.
Enhancements
- The "Last Forum Post" widget now shows the most recent posts not topics. In addition, the posts shown are based on the user's security settings.
- Added alternating colors to admin Member and Character list
- Modified a users post stats to show their total posts on all of guild launch and to provide more detailed statistics relating to the guild they are in.
- Added ability to reset your own post count if it gets out of sync with your actual post count. typically this is evident by a post count in the billions. Users can find this by clicking the "Update Post Count" button at the bottom of their user page.
- Changed phpBB session handling so that users should not get the invalid session error, or should get it significantly less or only in cases where it is actually appropriate.
- Profile Avatars (Images) will now be resized into 3 sizes. Tiny (60x60) Medium 100x100 and Large (250x250). The Medium will be used in the forums. The large will be used on the user page and the tiny is used in places like the shoutbox.
- Indication of historical rapid raid data. Rapid Raid stores data for characters who have raid data even if they have been removed from the guild. These characters are now marked with an asterisks on the Raid Details page in the attendees section and on the Events page. This should help you determine which characters are there for historical purposes and assist in removing extra characters if they are created.
- When a user selects their guild in the Guild Roster search page, they will now only receive results relating to their guild. If the item you searched for is not there, you will not receive results form other guilds but will instead receive no results.
- The user profile landing page has been reorganized. The page flows a bit better now and is easier to read.
- The "back to Guild" link has been removed from the right side of the header in admin and has been replaced by a linked guild name in the upper black bar. This was done to be more consistent with items like the "Admin" link and to make the view cleaner. In addition, the word "Guild Launch" have been removed from the logo on the top left of the admin site. We believe you know where you are... most days.
- Added a search widget that will let you search your site with Google.
- Performance on the main tab and the Characters tab of user profiles should be much better for people with alot of characters or many guilds.
Bug Fixes
- An issue where email addresses would not be fully updated when a user changed their email address has been resolved.
- An issue where errors would be encountered or the sorting would be incorrect when moving around widget in the Sidebar Widgets page in admin has been resolved.
-Email notifications for replies to posts will now have the correct server reference so you can click on the email link and be taken to the post.
-Fixed language on the forum authorization page to be more clear.
-Fixed issue which would not allow a user to change the case of their forum handle. (HOTFIXED)
-Fixed a security issue where a person given member privileges could elevate themselves to a site admin. This can no longer be done.
-Fixed description of site admin to note that a site admin "cannot" delete the guild. The previous language said they could even though the system actually wouldn't let them.
-Fixed certain queries that were taking too long to execute. The effect isn't visible, but should make the system more performant.
-An improper permissions setting which might allow an unauthorized user to manipulate a guild site's linkbox was fixed. (HOTFIXED)
-A rapid raid item details link that was broken has been fixed
-Visual issues with quote displays in signup have been fixed (HOTFIXED)
- 404 errors when importing profiles should now be a thing of the past (HOTFIXED)
- The guild roster will no longer blowout when an Armory import with more than 20 or so characters is performed.
- An issue with guild plans getting out of whack when a guild was upgraded has been resolved
- An issue which was causing cached account information to not refresh when a person confirmed their account has been resolved.
- An issue that did not correctly increment the guild masters post count when an application post was made has been fixed. This should reduce the occurrence of post counts becoming incorrect.
- An issue was fixed where the background image would not be correctly applied in certain templates. (HOTFIXED)
Advertising
- The advertising server has been moved to new hardware. This should increase the performance of Ad-Supported sites slightly, but will provide much more room for growth.
Signature Generator
- Appropriate avatars for LOTRO and Guild Wars have been added to the signature generator. http://sigs.guildlaunch.net/
Performance
- Over the last few weeks and in this release continued performance improvements have been made. (Some HOTFIXED)
- Certain information regarding guilds is now cached. This has reduced database calls to the database server and should improve
performance on a few of the user profile pages.
Miscellaneous
- A few "nofollow" and other robots.txt hints have been added to decrease the effect of Google and other bots indexing the guild sites. The search bots were previously indexing quite few pages that had very little content that was useful to be indexed.
Pardon Our Dust: Avatar Changes
Avatars are now resized on upload. We are currently displaying your previous unresized avatar on your profile page, but you will not have a forum avatar until you reupload the avatar from your user page. In addition, some animated gifs will no longer display and some transparent gifs might get changed. We feel these changes are important long term even if a little unsettling for our users. We appreciate your working with us while we transition.
To do this: Right click the existing one, click "Save Picture As" and save the picture to your desktop. You can then reload the avatar.
The old user page avatar will remain for a short while (a few days) and will then be replaced by the new resized one. Your forum avatar and shoutbox avatar will appear immediately.