New Boards, An AI, Recent Changes, and Other Info

First things first, there’s four new boards that have been introduced. Three of them were highly requested, those being /1701/, /dr/, and /nra/. There was also one other board, it’s a little more unique than the other. It’s a board with a chatbot built-in, and is called Netjester’s Closet. The bot that resides on this board learns everything that is posted to it. I’m sure you’ll all have a blast with it.

Other things, we’ve been doing some major overhauls in the way certain aspects of the boards are being handled. A few weeks ago we unified all the boards into one “master” board script. This means we only need to change one file for all the boards to be updated. The last few days has also carried some heavy architectural updates, the stylesheets are now organized in a much more sane manner, making future additions a breeze. The porting process is almost done, a few issues remain on the Classic stylesheet.

The postform was changed in several ways, it’s now more consistent between browsers, and a bug was fixed where early clicking of reply links would leave “Comment” at the start of a post.

Taimapedia has been a great success, with close to 1000 articles to date.

The store had to be delayed a little while due to some personal troubles involving money and a crappy employer. It’s still on track, however.

I think that’s everything. We hope you enjoy these updates!

420chan Firefox Extension Updated

Everyone on Firefox 3.5 can now use it fine. I took the opportunity to clean up a few bugs but there’s still some fixes eluding me – any Greasemonkey or jQuery users around to help me sort them out?

There’s a new function called the Discussion Map. This shows you every reply to a post. You’ll find the Reference links beside Quick Reply.

The extension now works under HTTPS. It’s been available for a while now, originally meant for staff purposes but is also used by some tinfoil hat wearing users.

There was another feature I was trying to work in for this release but unfortunately the original author of the script never tested it on 420chan, so I’m still debugging it myself.

Oh, those aforementioned bugs, I can’t figure out for the life of me how to make jQuery events fire outside of their normal scope – this is related to spoilers not working right in expanded threads.

Don’t use the 420chan Extension? Go here to get started!

Trying To Diagnose Process Spawning Issues

I have no idea what’s happening right now but I’m working on it. Seems like new Perl processes are starting at a significantly slower speed.

New Wildcard Topic and Advertising Information

The Wildcard board has been changed to Tattoos and Piercings. As always, if it turns out to be a decent topic then there is a chance the board will be made a normal offering.

As of last night I switched on our advertising server. I got sick and tired of dealing with shitty rates, people that had no idea what was going on with their ad network, advertisers taking advantage of people by putting out malicious ads, and plenty more I’d rather not ramble about. 4-5 months ago we were making less than $200 a month on ads. About 5 dollars a day. Anyone that’s been here long enough knows that this is way too little to cover our costs, and pretty insulting considering the number of impressions they get.

The bottom line is, we now run and control our own advertising. We can now deal with every person that wants to buy advertising time, one on one, and make sure that they are getting a proper audience while also putting a bit more money back into our pocket. We can also deny any advertising that we don’t think is a right match or is too annoying for our audience, which was a large problem before.

I hope that some of you wish to take advantage of our new offering, and mutually benefit from it.

Post Reporting is Now Live

I’m sure you’ve noticed the icon by now, expect things to change around a little over the next day or two.

We can ban you from the boards very quickly and easily if you abuse it, so don’t.

A Rundown of the Upcoming and New Features

There is now a 420chan archive available in http://www.420chan.org/bestof/ – links will be added soon. Eventually you’ll be able to assign ratings to a thread, and they will be sent to the archive automatically when they are pruned.

Post reporting is being finished up. It also has allowed us to be able to look up and remove bans from IRC, speeding the process up. Some other fun features utilizing it are on the way.

There’s now a Mibbit widget available at http://www.420chan.org/widget.htm