Forums Moving

Official Announcements
1

Tomorrow morning we'll be moving the forums to a new address ... forum.atlas-games.com

As you no doubt noticed, we're still fighting the hackers. By putting the forums in their own subdomain, we'll be creating a wall of sorts between the forums and the main Atlas site. By isolating each from the other, we're hoping to minimize the ongoing damage they can do.

This means you'll need to update your bookmarks when you see the forums have moved. Sorry for the trouble, and again, thanks for your patience.

2

So, the forums are back up! Please let us know if you encounter any trouble. Otherwise, enjoy!

3

Well the smilies went "funny", some dont seem to work at all(not showing graphically) and most others literally went pearshaped and somewhat distorted. "MrGreen" has no eyes and "Cool" seems to be having a really bad day for example.

And the ability to upload a small(or any at all) avatar disappeared with the last move as well it seems.

And something i was going to mention the other day(so dont know if its still around), for some odd reason when clicking "submit" button, sometimes( once in 10-15 tries maybe? ) the reaction is as if i had clicked "preview" or "save"; i simply figured i misclicked first couple of times but then it happened at least twice when i know i did it correctly.

Good luck on the hacker fighting...

4

Hi there. The avatar uploading was actually something that was dis-allowed on the pre-hack forums before we started doing all of these updates, and that we'd just overlooked re-setting. The reason for not allowing it is that we're VERY leery of letting anyone upload anything to our server, as you can imagine. You can still choose an avatar that you have located somewhere else, like Photobucket or your own site. We considered offering a set of "default" avatars to choose from that would be located on our server, but I couldn't find any decent ones that weren't a copyright infringement and that we were reasonably certain weren't a hacker vehicle. If anybody's interested in making us some "Atlas Games avatars" -- 80 px x 80 px images from our games, at 6k or less -- we'd be more than willing to put them up for everyone to use! Just email them to me at michelle AT atlas DASH games DOT com with "Atlas Avatars" in the subject header. [[Cross-posted this as a Sticky at http://forum.atlas-games.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4903 ... please leave comments on it there.]]

I'll put the other issues on the "To Do" list. Thanks! :slight_smile:

5

Fixed the smilies, but I'm not sure there's anything we can do about the "submit" glitch ... sounds like a bug in the forum programming, rather than a setting we can change.

6

The "lost" smilies now work and look just fine. The odd ones im afraid, or at least most of them, still look odd though(even after a ctrl+F5 update from server to renew everything(and i cant say i have ever before seen this sort of distortion on smilies)).
Edit: Hmm interesting, the smiley i included in the post looks better once posted than it does on the posting screen smiley selection area. Still a bit oddshaped, but at least the eyes became visible.

And the glitch, yeah i figured it was likely not something easily fixable. Its not a big deal, as either it gets posted or the post is saved or you get to preview it and just have to click submit again.

Ah, pity i was hoping it was simply added when you upgraded, as its far more convenient to use upload feature and i miss my cute little vampire.

Hmmm, well as long as the pictures are properly limited in filetype and size, proper renaming and storage placement there really shouldnt be any possible way to introduce either malicious code, open backdoors or create a buffer overflow using the function...
Oh well, i CAN imagine anyway...

As long as file renaming makes certain the pictures only get extensions that are not in any way seen as executables by the server, it should be fine.

The supposedly infamous .gif/php exploit for example simply wont work at all unless the file is allowed to be named something ending with .php AND the server software has htaccess mime type turned on AND the original uploader didnt bother checking the file for php-code(which i hope is standard by now)...

Anyway, just saying that image exploits is normally not a problem, as someone needs to do something specifically wrong on the receiving end for them to work. There may be some exploit out and about that i dont know about of course, but i doubt id miss such a security threat for long.
If you want to find out, you could simply try asking at just about any hacking forum(preferably from a computer using a very good firewall :mrgreen: (never seen anything malicious like this, but sometimes some peoples idea of a joke isnt the same as yours) ), people at such sites tend to be very helpful in general.

Hmm, wish i could, but i suck badly at anything beyond doing cut´n´paste.

7

Hi there. I'm not seeing any distortion of the smilies on my computer. Does anyone else have this issue? What OS/browser are you using? And which smilies in particular are affected?

8

Using Seamonkey browser(evolved Mozilla), just checked and the same oddities visible with Firefox.
All the smilies that were previously missing graphics looks ok(i think).
"Shocked" is missing the mouth, eyes are flattened slightly on top, pearshaped
"Cool", same eye flattening, mouth is just two dots at the ends which gives the impression of an unhappy face and again pearshaped(slightly flattened high up, slightly stretched downwards at the lowest part).
"laughing", "Mad", "Razz", "Embarassed", "Crying", "Evil", "Twisted Evil", "Rolleyes", "Neutral", "MrGreen" all seemingly have the same distortion as Cool and Shocked, not sure if the "!","?","Idea","Arrow" are affected as its harder to tell. Overall they seem to be variably stretched and compressed longitudinally the same way.
Hmm and looking closer i think the odd ones are slightly different in colour, more orangey.

They look better once posted, dont seem to loose any part of the graphic then, ie, no compression, only stretching.
Testing adding all oddies(edit: yup, all regain the parts that are missing when posting, but they´re still pearshaped/eggshaped(broad end up) and emptying cache or doing a update from server doesnt seem to change it)
(edit 2: the only smiley i know that uses that pearshape normally is one called "alien" or something like that) :
:open_mouth:
8)
:laughing:
:angry:
:stuck_out_tongue:
:blush:
:cry:
:imp:
:smiling_imp:
:unamused:
:neutral_face:
:mrgreen:

Have not encountered the posting glitch since the last downtime, maybe it was just something temporary...

9

I just replaced them all. Does that help?

10

Yup, now they all look normal so that worked perfectly it seems.

11

There still seems to be a problem with marking the Ars forum as read. It may have something to do with the sub forum that was made there. I can make other forums as read but not the Ars Magica forum. Is it a setting or could you just delete the sub forum post?

12

Can you describe your trouble with marking forums as read in a little more detail? When I go into a forum and then look at a particular topic, then back out to the forum again and refresh that thread is now marked as read, as it should be. When I go into a forum and click on "Mark Topics Read" at the bottom it makes all of the topics in that forum show as read, as it should be. Both seem to work fine for the Ars Magica forum. What is it you're doing exactly that isn't working?

13

In the upper right side of a form page there is a link for Mark Forum Read which, sets all topics as if you read each one.

14

Right ... there's the "Mark topics read" link at both the top and bottom of each forum page (like the Ars Magica forum). And there's the "Mark forums read" link at the top of the welcome page when you first log on. I've tried them all, and I can't seem to re-create the problem. Did you try a different browser? Anybody else having this trouble?

15

It was happening to me as well, but now it seems to have been fixed.

When I clicked the upper right "mark as read" link it didn't work at all, so I had to scroll down to use the down the bottom.

It started working fine for me a couple of days ago.

16

Hmm. Sounds like a programming glitch that might have been fixed when we moved?

17

AT the top, there is a mark forums read that only marks the sub-forums read and only applies to them. Between the Sub forum and the first actual AM thread there is a 'Mark Topics read' that marks the topics read. Press the correct one or it won't have the effect you are looking for.

18

Eureka! That's got to be the source of the confusion. So, when you go to the Ars Magica forum at viewforum.php?f=4 just look down a bit, underneath the temporary Ars test subforum but above the Ars topics, and use the "Mark topics read" link instead of the earlier "Mark forums read" link.

Thanks ladyphoenix!