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

Post Reporting Going Live, Need More Bug Reports

Sometime this week you’ll notice a new little icon next to posts, enabling you to notify staff of any rule violations or illegal content that inevitably shows up. The reporting system is part of a Board to IRC bridge that notifies all online staff in IRC, for much quicker responses. A lot of work has also gone into it to make sure it’s as abuse free as possible, but still usable for those of you that are intoxicated on a regular basis.

Once this addition is live, then we’ll be in a small cleanup period where we address and eliminate every bug or issue that has come up over the last few weeks.

This, of course, means that we need all of you to let us know of anything we may not be aware of. Browser-specific bugs, general bugs or errors, anything that needs to be fixed. Once this is done, we do some more changes and the cycle repeats.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to misunderstand just how much work is required to do, really, anything in regards to the boards. It’s not as simple as just adding some HTML and hoping it works. There is a lot of backend functions that are called for every single thing you see on the boards. Some changes require entire new functions to be written to make them actually work as intended. Even more changes require our database layout to be reconstructed or modified in some manner. If you make one little mistake or make a change without accounting for all the other things that need to be added to, or changed, it all breaks and falls apart like a house of cards.

I can elaborate more on this in a future blog post, with some examples, if anyone is interested. This also ties in to why we’re always so short on help, people assume it isn’t as hard as it actually is, then take one look at our source and give up almost immediately. We really are always short on decent help.

Layout Overhauls, Bugs, and the Post Report System

For the last few days you’ve probably noticed all the little changes here and there to the visual aspect of the boards. Probably because when I deployed them at first they were completely messed up, due to my habit of implementing things at 3 in the morning as I crash from all the coffee I drank during the day.

Basically, for the next few weeks, expect things to break here and there. The old board layout was designed entirely with tables, and switching it all to pure CSS is more than slightly problematic. It’s a lot of work testing everything in all the major browsers (I don’t have immediate access to Internet Explorer, for example), so just let me know in /420/ if you notice anything and I’ll check it out.

During these changes, the 420chan Extension will also need a lot of work. Why? Here’s an example: Where it used to insert quick reply links at the end of a table, it won’t know what the fuck it’s doing because the table isn’t there anymore. Now it’s a nested div. It’s confused!

Input box labels are gone. They will soon be skinned so they don’t look as awkward. There was a little bug introduced regarding reply links not clearing the form like it’s supposed to, shuffling the order which actions were performed in ended up fixing it.

The style links in the top right have been replaced with a menu, unfortunately it only works in Firefox and Opera, but most of you are using Firefox right now anyway. The rest of you will have to wait another day or so.

Graphics glitches involving various Windows platforms and the sandwich button have been fixed.

And lastly, coming very soon (this has been a long time coming), the ability to report posts to all moderators that are currently online. A lot of work is going into it to make sure it’s as abuse-free as possible before it goes live.

News Feeds Now Available On Some Boards

/weed/, /wooo/, /n/, /pol/, /tech/, /chem/, /balls/, and /vg/ now have RSS feeds below the post form.

The news feeds are as follows (and may change):
/weed/ – MAP Cannabis News
More drug board feeds to follow
/wooo/ – WWE Industry News
/n/ – Google World News
/pol/ – CNN Political News
/tech/ – Google Tech News
/chem/ – Google Science News
/balls/ – Google Sports News
/vg/ – Kotaku (lol)

Now you can use these boards for conversation and news!

Another addition, spoiler tags. They’re done like %this%.

I’m also cleaning up some old crud, getting red of leftover tables, that sort of thing.

Porn, Progress, and Planning

The last few weeks have been full of “fun”, ripping out entire chunks of code and redesigning things from scratch. There’s still a ton of work ahead of us and the biggest obstacle so far has, sadly, been keeping my team on-task. Do you have any idea how hard it is keeping a bunch of habitual cannabis smokers on task for more than a few hours? It’s pretty fucking difficult, let me tell you. And if they aren’t having problems with that, they’re forgetting to actually commit their changes to the code repository. I think I need to smack people around a bit because I’m practically the only fucker taking this seriously. More help is always nice, by the way.

There’s also been a lot of clamoring for the porn boards (or at least one porn board) to make a comeback. This can happen, provided we have a full compliment of mods dedicated to said boards. I’m considering seperating this content onto it’s own subdomain as well.

I think I’m going to go change the stylesheets a little bit to make the blog header more “visible” because I don’t think enough people are seeing this.