7/7/13

Did some minor maintenance to the forum area, moved forum areas around under the correct content area and added a few new games and sub-forums recently. Edited some of the forum descriptions and fixed a few broken links. Also added the ability for these new areas to post threads to the main page if they are new topics./

As always, I like feedback on the site to improve it and make it more user friendly and easy to find information more quickly.

Has the game list being removed ? as it just returns an error.

Yeah, I need to fix it and update it. It's just a huge task and I have been putting it off for quite a while now. This weekend I will see what i can put together to least get what I have working again and then I will worry about adding new items. Since I am not a 'real' web developer I'm not really sure how to make a forum that would update my database as people enter or least admin/mod enters a new game. Because right now it would be me updating it with a sql query every time. A form would be awesome to have 🙂

Fixed the permissions issues on all of the galleries on the site, for some reason the members group lost access to them. Should be fixed now.

Thanks, D1... it seems to work fine now.

Also spotted some issues in the download area with some permissions not right on some download directories, will be doing some consolidation of some areas if I can.

Hey D1 - I've been having problems loading SSC lately. I get a whole page of these:

Warning: simplexml_load_string(): ^ in /home/darkone/public_html/ssc/hooks/tz34_steamgroup_e435bb2170365a92f9bebb131e1b622d.php on line 48

Warning: simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line 17: parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: br line 12 and html in /home/darkone/public_html/ssc/hooks/tz34_steamgroup_e435bb2170365a92f9bebb131e1b622d.php on line 48

A couple of refreshes and the page will load correctly - apart from yesterday, when it wouldn't load at all for a while.

Yeah I sometimes get exactly the same problem. Saw it on Chrome for Windows, and also on my android phone

Yep, same thing here sometimes when loading the forum main page up.

Hmm, I saw something flash some errors the other night but I could never reproduce it.

Next time if you could capture a screenshot that would be great for investigation. I will look into the server logs and see if I see anything and force some cache reloads to see if that helps. That steam link on the mainpage is a simple image with a url linked to it so I doubt its that.

Dagnabbit!, it did it just now but when I read your post here D1 and reloaded the site its ok again, next time.....

Gotcha! It was too big for just one screen shot so here is the top and bottom parts. Hope that helps! EDIT: Those images below were when using Firefox, I've also tried it using Chrome and it "seems" ok. So I am unsure if it could bean issue with Firefox?

Good - it happened for me just now, but I hit the Oolite keys for a screenshot instead of PrtScn. That is exactly how it appears here.

That's a cool Firefox skin, btw - exclusively for discerning users! <chortles>

Thought you would like it Cody!

Yeah, I love that background image of galactic centre. I'll have to create an Elite: Dangerous version one day, methinks.

ATTENTION: Updating some site software and working on some issues. So if there is an outage or something not working you know why. Please hold off on site not working reports until I announce that it is completed.

I will be doing this most of the day and I will post here when done. Afterwards if you find anything do report it. Thanks!

Updates completed (will update as things are done):

- Blogger

- Content Mgr

- Download Mgr

- Gallery

- Shoutbox

- Nexus Store

- Forum

- Portal

- Site Theme

Site update should be complete. So please let me know if you see anything wrong or doesn't look right.

Also manually fixed an issue with my payment portal, for some reason it wasn't acknowledging the paypal transactions for the memberships so the payments would process but the user would have their group modified. I manually updated everyone and looked into tweaking some settings to help solve this. Please let me know if you don't see your group membership change after you pay for a subscription.

Good work, D1 - the only oddity I see is the Recent Gallery Images header, which expands okay, but looks greyed-out.

Good work, D1 - the only oddity I see is the Recent Gallery Images header, which expands okay, but looks greyed-out.

This still an issue for you Cody? Because it looks fine on my end.

Yeah, it's still greyed-out. No matter, it expands okay anyway.

It ain't the first time I've had a problem with that header, as I recall.

Did some minor maintenance to the main homepage to get things aligned better when viewing in 720, haven't seen it in 1080 but should be fine. In 720 the videos and some of the pics were messing up the format of the page. Should have fixed most instances of this issue with the tweaks I did.

Hopefully doing some site updates this weekend with patches.

Some other things I will hopefully be doing this weekend or next week with the holidays here in USA:

- Redoing some of the Gamersgate ads to more text based to help page load times and will probably add Greenman Gaming titles too since I get discount codes all the time from them and I should pass them on too you guys. Plus this is really the only way SSC builds up some cahs for these darn server hosting fees... so buy games 🙂

- Going to create some areas on the mainpage to link to either posts or info pages that will try to leverage the download area for all the developers. The download area does support selling games just no one has tried it yet (so looking for a developer) to help test it. Developer has total control of prices and if they want to stop selling the game or whatever I will touch on this later.

- Want to really make it more known that SSC gives free forum space to the devs of any games.

Updates 12/6:

- Updated site software to latest version and applied all security fixes

- Updated Tapitalk to the latest version

- Added a new Steam login method, so now you should be able to register and login via Steam (haven't tried this personally so let me know if it doesn't work)

- Been making some download area tweaks via the server to remedy some download troubles I have seen people have in the logs, people haven't reported anything but I am seeing issues.

- Removed all the Gamersgate images from the mainpage and readded only links and also added GOG links as well (so if you buy something use SSC to give me a hand in paying for this thing.)

- Fixed some random permissions issues with some of the groups so you may have access to something you haven't before (mainly gallery area issues).

- Created posts for download area info and developer info, just need to integrate it better with the main page to have it get more attention.

Like always if you see anything that is broken please let me know and screenshots are very helpful if hard to reproduce.

Been a while since I have done some maintenance on the site so over this week you may notice the following:

- Posts or threads may be deleted if they have no real value to the category
- User accounts will be deleted if they have been idle for over 2yrs
- Downloads cleaned up, mainly I will delete versions and keep the latest one
- Whole forum areas could be deleted if those areas haven't seen activity in over a year

Why is this being done? Well I have to upgrade SSC to a new platform and I am trying to clean up the DB and threads/posts to make conversion easier. And hopefully speed up the process in doing this because SSC will need to be down during the upgrade because I will be migrating the database and users. So the more I weed out stuff that isn't needed the better.

In need to do this update by the end of the year or SSC would go offline because the new server updates are not compatible with the software of this site, so I am forced to upgrade.

-D1-

I've noticed a problem with the Pioneer/Pioneer Musical Appreciation Society thread. It seems to be trying to load all of the YouTube videos at once when I try to view it, slowing down my browser to the extent that I can't finish loading the page. I'm on Linux Mint 18 and the latest Firefox, using NoScript. It doesn't matter if it's on or off.