Time for some good news!
The impromptu forum maintenance earlier this evening allowed me to upgrade our forum version to 4.3.1 - with the new version comes some new features!
Emojis
????
We've enjoyed Forum Emoticons for years, and as the rest of the world has been integrating Emoji's into their software, it's about time we had some too. The old forum emotes have now been removed and the custom RO specific emotes are now in their own category under the emote icon on the text editor.
I've opted to use the Twitter style instead of the EmojiOne style as they are what we're used to seeing as the default Discord Emojis, but if enough members would prefer those instead then we can switch. Github uses a Native style, and we can only pick one.
Apple Pay / Google Pay
?
Many users have been sending me messages, PMs, hate mail, death threats, etc over the fact that we swapped Paypal for Credit/Debit Card only payment processing.
I'm pleased to announce that our updated forum software is compatible with Apple and Google Pay platforms for both mobile devices and supported browsers.
Spammers
??
Over the last two to three months we've seen a dramatic increase in spambots posting their topics on how to grow your ? or build some ?. The new update includes several new algorithms that allows spambots to be caught more effectively without Moderator intervention.
Searching
?
It has been noted that the search method in the older IPB 3.x forum software was much smoother than the recent implementation - so IPS 4.3 has changed it all.
We should now* have more accurate search results displaying when searching for more than one word, and don't forget you can encase your phrase in quotes "to search the string as-is".
*When the search index has finished re-caching.. will probably take 5-6 hours still.
ReCaptcha
?️?
Those daft "type the words as you see them" have now been removed in favour of Google's "Invisible ReCaptcha" platform.
The forums will now determine whether or not you're human and let you use the forums to one's heart's content without being randomly asked to read unreadable text.
There are other improvements but nothing worth mentioning as normal members won't see/interact with them. If you come across something that doesn't work as it should, please let me know by posting as much detail as possible in https://rathena.org/board/forum/224-forum-issues/
?
I think that's enough good news for one day.
Akky out~