April 23
(Note that some of these changes were made before April 23.)
Server Migration
On March 29, the server was successfully migrated to a new host, managed by the wonderful team at
GeyserHost! It is much more powerful, making more room for additional future services and improving performance.
As part of the migration, the board is now accessible at
https://talesofcelestia.com/board. The base URL,
https://talesofcelestia.com, will also still work! Note that if you linked to any topics directly using
https://talesofcelestia.com/viewtopic.php (note the lack of /board/), these will need to be changed to the new URL - I will be working on a redirect for these old links in the future.
Alongside the migration, some features have improved in the backend:
~ Search now uses
Sphinx. This is for futureproofing, preventing searches from being too slow when we have a very large number of posts in the future. You likely won't notice any change to search, though it may be slightly faster.
~ phpBB has been updated from 3.3.8 to 3.3.10, bringing with it minor improvements. These are mainly backend improvements, including an official fix for emojis not displaying properly as outlined in
our first changelog. To see what these improvements are, you can check the phpBB changelogs for
3.3.9 and
3.3.10.
Please note that as a result of this migration, the following quirks may occur:
~ Your profile picture
may be (but probably isn't) a previous one, or outright broken. In this case, you will need to reupload your profile picture.
~ Attachments uploaded to the board may be broken. If this is the case, reupload the attachments.
As part of the migration, a MediaWiki instance was created. It has since been deleted, as it wasn't properly set up and didn't meet expectations. A new one will be tested and properly set up in the future.
Additionally, views on some topics have been set to a lower number, as they were inflated by web crawlers and bots.
Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns, or if you find any bugs.
Board Features
~ Attachments no longer show view counts or file information under them, for a cleaner look.
~ Expired sessions and server downtime should no longer cause in-progress drafts to be lost. You should still use the save draft feature or copy your posts elsewhere to save your drafts if you need to take a break, but this should mitigate some draft loss in the future.
~ The general rules have been reformatted.
Character Guidelines
~
Legendary and Mythical Pokemon can now have other Legendary and Mythical Pokemon in their backstories. Regular Pokemon still cannot without prior permission.
~
Future Paradox Pokemon are now freely available to use! Koraidon, Miraidon, Walking Wake, and Iron Leaves are not playable at this time. A note on their backstories were also added.
~ Added more guidelines regarding artist credit, as well as resources for official art and the PMDCollab sprite repository.
Chat
~ Moved the roleplay discussion channels in the Discord server to a new dedicated category.
~ Created
#
qna and
#nontoc-qna in the Discord server, spaces where characters can answer questions proposed by the community. This is not available in the Matrix Space. Forums will be made for this soon.
~ The Discord server has received extended markdown support, allowing members to use headers, masked links, and lists! This functionality may look a bit broken in the Matrix Space for a little while, but this feature cannot be disabled so there isn't much I can do. In the meantime,
#
rules-info was updated to use this new feature!
~ Added an AutoMod rule to the Discord server to prevent URLs with session IDs from being sent.
~ Added an AutoMod rule to the Discord server to block certain negative words, after a recent incident with a new member. If a message with one of these words is sent, an alert is sent to the modchat and the user is timed-out for sixty seconds. Don't worry, we won't punish you for false positives.
Future Plans
Sorry for the wait on this changelog. I'm almost done with college and I need to hunker down to focus on that. In the meantime, here is what I would like to do with ToC next, in no particular order:
~ Redirect links to topics using the old URL, to the new URL.
~ Build the system for, and gain feedback on, submissions for towns, dungeons, guilds/organizations.
~ Finish the first expedition.
~ Build, and gain feedback on, the inventory system and item availability.
~ Try the MediaWiki again, as something off to the side rather than as the main focus. Static pages, etc. will be made there in the future for easier maintenance. It will look nice with time.
~ Create a self-hosted Synapse instance, instead of the current Space hosted on matrix.org. This makes room for a self-hosted Discord bridge with better performance than the current public one, as well as additional expansion of features by the community.
~ Build the Celestium board style.
~ Properly build the GitHub pages for contributors.
~ Create a page to properly advertise the Discord server and Matrix Space to users.
~ Create pages for lore on the MediaWiki.
~ Figure out a way to log post edits on the board.
~ Create a better workflow for changes.
If you'd like to help the staff team make Tales of Celestia a better place,
we are currently accepting staff applications!
qna
rules-info