floraiN 252 Hello Members, as all of you noticed our forum has gone through some intense hours of downtimes and maintenances. We had some security issues that we are not going to disclose any further, nut we have been working very hard to fix those issues and prevent them from happening again. We take security pretty serious, especially considering the size and popularity our forum gained throughout the couple of last months. I can't tell you any more details about the downtimes, but we worked hard until the morning to get the forum back online with some changes within our plugins. With that being said we are also changing a lot of plugins we have, some of them already have been disabled as they have been causing unnecessary load usage which made the whole forum very slow. We were sitting at around 800ms to load the whole index page, 500ms to load threads. This wasn't acceptable anymore; here is a little list of plugins that got removed. Showing Team Online, Avatars on Forumsdisplay, Who was Online the last 24 Hours, Shoutbox Stats, Profile Comments, RPS Stats in Profiles Will they come back? Yes, but only Showing Team Online. The overall forum performance is always more important than one certain plugin with a minimum gain. There are also tons of other (custom) plugins that need a whole rewrite and I'm also aware of the profile cover issues. We will address those very soon. Removal of RPS I also had to remove our Gambling Game "RPS" that many of you loved. I know this decision might upset some users, but let me give you an explanation on the why. Multiple members were still able to gain some incredible amount of profits (couple of hundred €'s) and have been buying valueable things with those earned credits. Awards, Stickies, Thread Styles; some even tried to sell their credits for a real currency. All those things are going to hurt the economy. Not only the credits economy in general, but also credits purchases directly made from our shop. Awards, Items and other goodies will be less valueable if people have them stacked eventhough they just have been lucky. Again: I know this might be an unpopular decision and I feel sorry for those you enjoyed playing it, but I believe this step was necessary to keep the economy healthy and stable. 1vs1 betting against other members will remain as it is, same goes for High Roller against the system. Upcoming Changes As a little compensation for the latest downtimes I want to give you a quick and short summary of what we have in store for the next weeks. On our index page we will remove the top right global statistics. They have been there since day 1, which is almost one year ago. I know this change might be tough for some users as you really get used to certain layouts, but this change is really needed. We will move those stats to the footer and fill the area with some quick stats related to your user account. I have some cool indeas in mind and I'm sure we can replace our golden statistics with something better long term wise. I'm also going to add a rank-based star icons on user profiles in each usergroups color. Some of you might have seen something similar on previous forums, but for some reason no one uses those anymore. We'll try to make them look nice and giving ranks a little tier system. Also coming this month: shoutbox marketplace channel and @cracked.to emails with a permanent forward for Supreme Members All the changes we made had a positive affect on the overall forum performance, especially loading the index page should give you a whole different feeling. There are couple of more improvement options that we found and already working on. A special thanks to the whole team who've worked very hard the last couple of days! And always remember: the real work is behind the scenes :) Best regards, Cracked.to Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
