miraro3

@Minty can join as well. I've always wanted to have a Duvel with that guy. Even when you realize that Jessica is a man?

It would make a great Hollywood movie, i'm sure

@VenoM will come as well, but since he will be taking his bike here we will have to make sure he knows it quite some time before it actually is going to happen.

How about a small meet up in Bruges this summer? Lan party will be a bit hard to organize but a beer party on the other hand... @Wolf will also come. Or at least that's what I heard.

Charleroi, hmmm I guess that's close to @PurpleHaze ? I live in the Bruges area, nice and calm ^^

Woo, another Belgian! Welcome! Where are you from?

Eventually I think that will be the right thing to do. I have a thesis to finish this month. If we don't have a chat box by the time I'm done with my thesis I will create a chat myself. I've already spent some time thinking about the mechanics and I think I might be able to pull it off without too much effort.

I think we are on the same level when it comes to that. Security, especially these days, should be top priority. I have taken a look at the chat settings only to notice that it's quite limited. I also noticed that the automatic clearing of chat history is not working. I've spent some time on chat and I'm not loving the experience completely. I've also been thinking that maybe a different chat might be a better option, so I would gladly take a look at the chats you mentioned. I also haven't had the time yet to take a deep dive into it, which is why there aren't any changes made yet. Which is probably good, since there might be better options on the market than blab chat.

Pm'd you.

Woops.

Thank you, I will look into it. One last request. Can the chat button be moved two places down the navigation? I think it makes more sense to have portal and forum before chat.

The chat being standalone is one problem because it pulls the user out of the "forum environment". That's easily fixed by just embedding the external page into a normal forum page, as I've already done. We, being both Charlie and myself, lack the permissions in the ACP to hide the "chat room" button in the main navigation and replace it with the "chat" button which is now hidden as a sub-item of the portal button. (The former page should keep existing, it should just not be visible in the navigation anymore, since that page is being embedding in the latter page) Another problem with the chat is the fact that the user needs to sign in before being able to use the chatroom. This is an extra step that bring accessability and user experience down by quite a bit since they already had to sign in to the forum to be able to use the chat room in the first place. The database access was to help make the connection between the chat and the forum. Althought I believe that we can find other solutions for this because as your said, direct DB access should be a last resort because of security reasons. Next is the look of the chat room which is a design that probably originates from somewhere around 2007-2010 I'd say. It works but it's not appealing and the controlls are rather bulky and distracting. We can fix this, no problem. The history of the chat should be removed together with the censorship. One of the beauties of the old chat was that you could say what you want when you wanted it without having to worry about anyone reading what you said at any point in the future. This encourages open discussions and deeper social connections. I would love to take a look at the API for the chat client and see what I can do with it to make some improvements. Of course in a team effort with Charlie and the others.

Craig I have always looked up to you and respected you so the last thing I want is to start a fight. This response is not meant to attack you in any way. I hope you understand that before reading further. I don't agree that there is a consensus that you have to do everything immediately when something needs doing. What I would agree with is that there are some tasks that simply should be done as soon as possible with the best interests of this community in mind. We have an admin team in place with an ambitious new leader who are more than willing to do these tasks for you but the problem is that even Charlie doesn't have complete access to the services needed to do these tasks for you. You are our founder, the one who has been so generous to invest so much time and money in a community that we have all loved for so many years. If, after all these years, you do not feel like putting the same amount of time into this than nobody will blame you for it. You have done your fair bit and it has been an amazing carreer. But please, let the others do the work for you then so that we can continue what you have started and maybe improve some things here and there along the way. I also don't agree that this community of people never do what you ask them to do. There have been many people in TM, some aren't anymore but a lot still are, that have been willing to put a lot of work in. Some of these people have been overlooked and some of these people just never were asked to help out when and where needed. Just look at Eagle who has spent an unhealthy amount of hours tinkering around in here. If anything, the wrong people were asked to do things at the wrong moment in time or just lost their motiviation to do things for whatever reasons they might have had. I feel like, for reasons unknown, that you are only seeing the negative side of the community at the moment. I don't know what happened and I since we never had a conversation on a deep personal live I don't expect you to tell me right here and now. But, I hope from the bottom of my heart that whatever is going on with you right now will pass over sooner than later. I hate to see you like this compared to the times when you seemed to enjoy yourself. If it's real life related you can take some time of to sort things out, all of us will understand. Just pass the keys to the kingdom to the admin team so that we don't have to send you PM's all day and all night for things that may appear to be trivial to you. All of us would be more than happy to annoy Charlie with that. If everything is fine outside of TM, then I beg you to be open with us and have a conversation with us to let us know what exactly is going on. There might be so much more things annoying you than we know of. And if that is the case we should know about it and try to find solutions for it as a team. Never has a solution for a problem been found without decent communication.

Outraged.

So we're not going to try to improve the look & feel of this thing a little bit?

This right here is dedication ladies and gentlemuppets

Just a misunderstanding mate, we didn't take you admin level away! No worries, someone will set it back for you as soon as they see you on the server

In that case we can consider it as a temporary solution. Emphasis on the temporary

Do you mean the shout box? Since there's a lot of sensitive information in that one it might be worth looking into if we can somehow have two of those running at the same time, with different access restrictions.

Well, the main thing about the chat on site is that it is supposed to increase site activity because it gives people a reason to visit this site. There are indeed a lot of out-of-site activities but using those as a replacement will not do the forum activity any good. The reason chat was empty lately is most likely because there isn't much effort going into keeping the chat active either. We had @MadF.Lame who did a great job for a long while to be in chat almost all the time every day and during those times we had a decent chat activity. Since he has no time for it anymore and since nobody has picked up after him most people will just leave chat if they notice that it's empty. It works kinda the same way like our servers -> people bring people. So dear admins, I strongly suggest to find an alternative that we can use internally here.

How hard can it be to build our own version of the chat? @Eagle_cz I don't think discord can be integrated into the site, and that is a requirement if we are going to choose a replacement for the old chat

Well this topic died real fast

It's not even April fool's yet though D:

Well first of this will be for server running on legacy, not our NoDownloads server Secondly, I believe that fragging like you're used to also helps the team to victory, so you should be fine

Aaah here is the new face who showed up on chat last night Shame we didn't get to talk! This sounds like an interesting concept for sure!