• Policy for suicidal posting updated Sept 2020 - This predates my ownership of the site, but I’m not sure if many posters are aware of it– we completely updated our policy on suicidal posting/posters and drew on suicide hotlines and other resources to create the current policy. Thanks to Cyrano, Athanatos, Goons are Great, and twoday for all their work on this. (If we have missed anyone, please let us know!)
  

• Handling drama - There have been various dramatic events that have come up and we’ve done our best to handle them in a respectful and professional way. Unfortunately, this takes up a lot of time and resources. Please be less dramatic.
  
• I'm sure many of you have noticed that I am scatterbrained and don't always follow through on things I say I will do. This is not remotely acceptable and so I have hired an admin assistant to keep me on task. Her username is wintertime and she will also be running the SA’s twitter account. She might PM you if you make content that she wants to feature on there, so stay tuned. Shoutouts to her for helping me actually get this monster post put together.
  
• Athanatos put together announcements that highlight ongoing and interesting threads across different forums. These were great - it can be hard to find new threads, which I talk more about below, and getting handed a list of new ones semi-regularly helps. Look forward to more of these and let an admin know if you have ideas for threads that could go in a future announcement.
  
• Established forumadmins email address - As forum members sometimes find it hard to reach the admins, we established a new email address, forumadmins@somethingawful.com. This goes to all admins and can be used to reach us in the event of an emergency or even just for regular feedback.
  
• Pragmatica continues to keep the “behind the scenes” organized - from tracking internal issues and establishing processes in finding moderators to encouraging feedback on how we can be better mods and admins. For example, she revised and expanded on Ozma’s original Mod Handbook from 10 years ago and is now a massive guide to the mod tools, procedures on SA, and represents a great deal of work. The “mods, the queue, and you” thread in ask/tell contains text from an older version of this that you can see here. Historically, the forums moderation side was very informal and a bit disorganized, and her work has encouraged better record-keeping and streamlining processes for more consistency across the forums.
  

• Mod guidelines - We are currently finishing a list of public-facing guidelines for how mods should conduct themselves. This is something I promised a long time ago and am going to deliver on now. Expect to see them in the near future.
  
• Handling drama - This will, of course, be ongoing as things crop up, but we are actively working on better ways to handle drama and head it off before it becomes a big problem.
  
• Site outreach using other social media - The Twitter has been dormant for quite some time, but as part of our mission to redirect the public to less stupid forms of the internet, we have decided to get it running. People on twitter will see random funny things from the forums and perhaps some of them with senses of humor will show up to post. Other ways of reaching potential new users are in the planning stages.
  

• Site growth - This is, far and away, the most important issue facing SA. How do we get new users to come here? I’m listening. If you have ideas, we want to hear them. Promoting funny content from the forums is the obvious first step, and we’re underway on that plan, but let’s hear your weirder and funnier ideas for this one. We have money to spend on this and are actively looking for ways to spend it fruitfully. We want to find people who have senses of humor and contribute their own content.
  
• Site interface changes - What do you guys think about us providing ways of more easily finding new threads? I think this is an issue - a lot of users stick to their bookmarks and don’t necessarily see new threads, not even ones that would sincerely interest them. Sometimes a thread is rebooted and user never finds the new one, and “loses” that thread forever. What do you guys think of new threads “sticking” on the first page of a forum for awhile longer, so you’d see some mix of the newest threads with the newest-posted-in threads? I don’t want to change fundamental site features like this without talking about it, but I do think this is a real limitation. Do we surrender to web 2.0 and try to figure out “threads you might like”? Produce more ad banners for threads that are seeking new users? Athanatos's announcements are a step in the right direction here, but I think we could automate some things here
  
• Support page/forum rules revamp - The support page as it stands is out of date and nearly useless. The forum rules are a front page article for some reason. We would like to rework these entirely to make them more useful.
  

• Updated forums PHP version from 5.3 to 7.4. This represents a decade’s worth of changes to the programming language the site runs on. The forums store runs on 8.0 and we’re working on the forums upgrade to that now.
  
• Correspondingly, our databases are now all running up-to-date modern versions of mariadb.
  
• In addition to all the security and modernization that comes with using maintained tools, the site now loads a whole bunch faster as well.
  
• Off site backups ensure that a single natural disaster can’t wipe out our whole database forever.
  
• Just about all of our image and video storage now uses simple modern object stores instead of an expensive file server.
  
• Established “Thread IKs” as a proper forums feature
  
• The waffleimages have returned. Ancient memories, made whole again. Speechless.
  

• Further php version updates - serious code modernization is underway.
  
• Frontpage overhaul. I am.....distraught at how long this has taken but I promise it is really coming. The frontpage is important as a way for the outside world to get a glimpse inside our forums and I would like to get back to that, pronto.
  

• Better post attachments - “attachments 2.0”
  
• Public Contribution! At the very least, we intend to open up our CSS and javascript for public patching. Unlike the forums code, this code is entirely owned by us and we are happy to accept patches and suggestions on how to make it better.
  

• Previous developers’ code edits were not recorded: the last tracked items we could find dated back to late 2014. Edits to the forum’s code since then had been made on the live servers only, including edits performed directly on the mangled machine-readable version of the forum’s JavaScript files rather than the human-readable source code files. A development/staging server (where the site’s developers could test code changes before they went live on the website) was partially configured, but unused. In short: it was a mess.
  
  
• The forums were originally (in radium times) set up to have both primary and secondary database servers. However, after everything was virtualized and moved to the cloud in 2016, the former owner was uninterested in having any sort of redundancy, let alone backups. We built out some replicas and set up backups around a year and a half ago; earlier this year we successfully moved to an even more modern set of database servers with significantly higher specs. This has almost completely eradicated the intermittent spikes in page load time we were seeing with the old one. We also have remote backups prepared in the event of some sort of disaster.
  
  
• There was a virtual storage server that hosted the site images/videos/downloads, forum images, etc. We migrated all of these to a modern type of file hosting using object storage. At the same time, we upgraded the forum store so it would remain on supported software versions to ensure continued PCI compliance. We significantly enhanced its security, and your data is safer than it ever has been. As a reminder, no part of the forums/store/etc. store any of your payment information; that is all stored/handled by the payment processor.
  
  
• The majority of the forum stylesheet and JavaScript files were still hosted on the forum servers themselves, and they did not benefit at all from any content delivery network (CDN). We moved those files to object storage as well, where they would successfully be cached, meaning quicker load times for forum pages; we also improved the caching strategy so that Firefox users’ browsers would no longer need to revalidate every image, stylesheet, and JavaScript resource on the page any time they hit . And, speaking of stylesheets, don’t forget there’s a dark mode now.

• When the forums were especially busy, pages could start to take multiple seconds to load or even time out entirely, making the forums unusable. This was resolved with a newer version of the forum’s data cache software.
  
• Posts used to sometimes get “stuck”, needing a new reply to “free” them; this turned out to be caused by the script that handles new replies doing two tasks out of order. The cache would be cleared before the new reply was available, meaning if someone viewed the thread in that brief timespan, the page would be re-cached without the latest reply.
  
• Putting unicode into your custom title in the store would completely mangle it, and that has all been fixed.
  
• Just a week ago we fixed an incredibly annoying issue with thumbnail images (timgs) where they would screw up people’s scroll position when trying to jump to a specific post.

fez_machine fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Dec 9, 2022