The Interguild

9/4 Weekly Update

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Quirvy

If you are wondering why the weekly update was released so late it's because I missed half of the week, and when I asked our fellow staff members to do this week's weekly update, everyone was able to step down. And I mean everyone. I was forced to give up on them Saturday and make it myself based on an outline that Livio provided for the one to make the update. Unfortunately, he did not provide the highest and lowest rated posts of the week, so it had to be further delayed. And also GF4 was unable to make a comic this week. So yeah, we're totally functional.

Breaking news that actually happened a while ago!!! This week neopets announced that next week will be the final Cave of the Week for Hannah and the Pirate Caves, and it has been reported that it will be replaced by another spotlight!! How will this affect us? Well, we won't be able to win HatPC spotlights anymore, and that's really just about it. Although, there has been a lot of speculation that it will lead to the surprise release of a HatIC cavemaker, but this is neopets, so we encourage you to not get too excited about anything that hasn't been announced. There's also been other speculation that it would mean the end of hatpc cavemaking, but thus far we have no legitimate reason to believe that, as making caves is not dependent on the Cave of the Week.

Jellsprout has begun a Interguild Collaboration Project for Knytt Stories! Unfortunately, I'm not part of the effort, and can't really tell you that much about it other than that it exists. But I'm sure that whenever jell comes online, he'll be glad to edit in all sorts of information into the weekly update about how awesome it's going to be. Right, jell?

...jell?

[edit by jellsprout: That's right! It's super awesome!]

Oh, hey, speaking of Jell, he recently made a new topic where you can answer his questions!

The log-in form has been updated, so that you can log in automatically hidden. And unfortunately now when you're hidden, nothing about hidden users show up on the online members list, which means that we are unfortunately taking one step towards becoming just like Ice Caves.net

On Saturday, Yaya started posting the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody in the chatbox, and then other people(Kittikiyana, Isa, canadianstickdeath, Dando, Harumbai, Jazz) joined in. Except for Livio and Silver who both tried to sabotage them. It took them 5 hours and 52 minutes to accomplish this feat.

There's also a Random Word Competition going on right now. It ends next week, so you still have time if you have not made an entry yet!

Oh, and by now I think most people are in school or college or whatever, so it's likely that there will be a decrease in activity for our members, not just because they'll be at school, but because they'll be doing their homework. Right, kids?

Post of the Week: Dando on the censored version of The Interguild
Fail Post of the Week: Jorster poor displays of grammar
Level of the Week: Return Trip by Yaya
Video of the Week: Basic Cave Making Part 1

No "The Interguild" this week

All-game Comp #6: Random Word 3

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Isa

Both Guyguy and Soccerboy requested this, and I think that after the IO, you may want to do whatever you want. So here you go.

All-game Comp #6: Random Word 3

Start Date: Monday, Aug 30, 2010
End Date: Monday, Sep 13, 2010
Game: Content from any game is allowed

Competition Rules:

The first Random Word contest was HatPC only, which is natural seeing as it was hosted on the old forums. However, there's no need to restrict you this time around (and really, not the second time either).

To enter, make a level that revolves around a word. Any word, you choose. "Zoology" could be the name of a level that revolves around monsters of any kind, for example. Do not make up words!

Submitted Entries:

1) Characidae (HATPC) - DeathBunni X
2) Panspermia (Splitter 2) - GF4
3) Bathos (HATPC) - guyguyxtreme
4) Leccinum (SMF) - krotomo
5) Quiescence (HATPC) - Harumbai
6) Troublesome (HATPC) - sup_mus
7) Technology (HATPC) - soccerboy13542

Click here to submit a level

8/28 Weekly Update

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Quirvy

Livio has asked me to make my opening paragraph not be about imtimi still not having returned, so as a result, I will refrain from doing so.

This week, the interguild olympics came to a close. KarmaBites win!

If KarmaBot was here to see this, he would be so proud. Unfortunately, he seemed to disappear right about the same time as imtimi...

Anyways, the KarmaBites won by only half a point, which I don't even get, but whatever. Oh, and second place was a tie between the two other teams, Team GREATS and the Ninja Koopas.

GF4 won the Pentathlon rankings and Yaya won the overall individual rankings. Both are considered enormous upsets considering that Harumbai participated in the Interguild Olympics.

Now that it's all over, you can check out your opponents' secret boards! On top of that, the Judgernauts Discussion thread has been released to the public! You now know one more thing than Livio does.

Soon after the final IO Results post, Livio made another newspost announcing the end of the IO, where one would normally expect the "Best of"s to go. Unfortunately, there were only highlights, although the judgernauts are trying to form awards, but so far, no luck.

Harumbai won neopets' cave of the week on Thursday with his easy but still fun level Fall for Gold! Quirvy also made another cave, Locked Out, which was made using concepts seen in Dando's caves!! Then, to top it all off, just this past day, Harumbai made a level, funx, inspired by Quirvy and Dando's recent levels!!

And as much as we love to glorify caves made by revered users, I also suggest that you check out soccerboy's Push, as he has been quietly making some pretty good caves, too.

In other news, Yaya has some weird image greeting society in his signature now:

The weeks most prominent news story, however, is the wave of people using colors in the chatbox names. It started with a simple chatbox post by kitti using this color. Quirvy then soon after took to his own chatbox color, and before anyone knew it, even Dando's name was colored!

We suggest that you try not to abuse this with eyesore colors, like fuchsia(canadianstickdeath...) or something that is too dark for most people to easily read(Livio...)

Oh, and Livio suggested I talk about it, so earlier ~~today~~ yesterday canadianstickdeath, attempting to spread his obsession with the color fuchsia, tried to censor every instance of "color=" to "color=fuchsia". This luckily failed to work. Unfortunately, it failed to work in a way that crashed the site. Later on he succeeded in censoring everything every instance of the letters c, o, l, r and probably = as well to the color fuchsia. Then later on finally managed to get it right, and every unique color was changed to fuchsia. Unfortunately, before he could celebrate his victory, the censors were deleted. And then after that there was some laughing going on, but I don't know what that was all about. Ask Livio.

Quote of the week:

shos said:

so uh, [offtopic: oh my god i think someone near me jsut farted, it smells so awful here] firstly, you should treat this rate as a 7, but i wanted to ease on the rates of 9.5 and 9.6 from people who didn't even see the cave and/or comment about it.

Post of the Week: canadianstickdeath on the KarmaBites' IO victory
Fail Post of the Week: Livio revealing his secret identity as Captain Oblivious
Level of the Week: Voodoo by DeathBunni X
Video of the Week: Steel Insanity Runthough by Quirvy

THE INTERGUILD:

Spoiler: The Interguild

The Interguild Olympics have Ended

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Livio

The Interguild Olympics are now officially over! On Sunday we posted the final medal count, which revealed Team KarmaBites as the winning team of the IO, while Team GREATS and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Koopas tied for second. Other big winners include GF4 winning the Pentathlon mini-tournament and Yaya being at the top of the Individual Rankings.

IO Highlights

Out of the 88 unique entries submitted this year, here are 18 of the best and most memorable:

	Faith by Dekudude A simple Knytt Stories level that tells a story of a boy who finds the faith to believe in himself.
	Paradoxes by Livio A perplexing Electric Box puzzle that left many scratching their heads.
	Hydrodynamics by shos Shos's challenging underwater HATPC puzzle.
	CantStopTheFlow by Harumbai A large HATPC level with several creative traps involving the use of a rising water level.
	Dropped by soccerboy13542 A level that had many of us skeptical, at least until we saw the epic video walkthrough.
	TrIO Walkthrough by Harumbai An incredible, 8-minute walkthrough of Harumbai's three major IO entries.
	These Caves Upload by canadianstickdeath CSD originally thought this was a mediocre, but it turned out to be a very enjoyable compilation of walkthroughs.
	Advance and Retreat by GF4 I didn't play this much, but Harumbai thought it was amazing. Also from the video walkthrough, it looks really cool.
	Advance and Retreat Walkthrough by GF4 A very nice walkthrough featuring several different songs which change to match the mood of certain sections of the cave.
	Splitter 2: DDA Tips and Tricks by GF4 A very nice guide that can give you some interesting ideas for your Splitter 2 levels.
	Pwn Dancing: The Lost Art by Yaya An intriguing and comical look into the art of Pwn Dancing.
	GET TO DA CHOPPAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!! by Yaya Yaya's HATPC epic inspired by one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's lines in The Predator.
	Team GREATS Collab Level by shos, soccerboy13542, Woodstock, and krotomo A really cool Super Mario Flash collaborative level brought to you by Team GREATS.
	DDAeon by canadianstickdeath CSD's super cool Aeon DDA.
	For Seasons by Ckjr On the homepage, I defined this as "literally the most epic thing mankind has ever seen". Three and a half weeks later, and it still is.
	Steel Insanity by Quirvy An almost-easy cave that was built to be fun, rather than challenging.
	Bombard by Harumbai A really cool but simple idea for a cave.
	Highground Falls by GF4 A challenging Free Rider 2 obstacle track.

I would also like to announce that all the team boards have been opened to the public now. So now you can go in and see what the other teams were up to during the IO.

And now, as CSD so gracefully said:

Closing ceremonies:

-->
Torch extinguished.

And now, the Karmabite national anthem:
Maintenant, l'anthem national du Karmabite:

"The words of the prophets were written on the studio wall.
Concert hall.
And echos with the sound
Of salesmen."

IO Medal Count #5 - FINAL

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Livio

We've reached the final medal count of the Interguild Olympics!

IO 2010 - Cycling (Free Rider 2)
1st: Highground Falls (FR2) - GF4
2nd: Rock Climbing (FR2) - soccerboy13542
3rd: Suspiciously Generic FR2 Level (FR2) - Livio
4th: 1 Line - 5 Minutes (FR2) - canadianstickdeath

IO 2010 Pentathlon Round 5 - Aeon
1st: DDAeon (Aeon) - canadianstickdeath
2nd: Bounce (Aeon) - soccerboy13542
3rd: Equal Reaction (Aeon) - GF4
4th: Hey, where did I go? (Aeon) - rosabellis
5th: OMG Superspeed (Aeon) - krotomo

IO 2010 - Tennis (Collaborative Levels)
1st: Arrow Jumble (HATPC) - Harumbai, Yaya
2nd: Team GREATS Collab Level (SMF) - Team GREATS
3rd: Ninjamario Time! (SMF) - rosabellis, Woodstock, Angelfish
4th: Level 7: Lava Lair (ZC) - canadianstickdeath, Dekudude
5th: NinjaMiniCave (HATPC) - rosabellis, Ckjr
6th: Team3Collab (HATPC) - Livio, Ckjr, rosabellis
7th: Butterflies and Hurricanes (HATPC) - guyguyxtreme, Kittikiyana
8th: The level that was left unfinished (HATPC) - rosabellis, Ckjr, GF4
9th: LolWut (HATPC) - GF4, Livio

What an incredible display of mediocrity by the Ninja Koopas in this round! Meanwhile, the KarmaBites gain big key victories.

The way we calculated the collab round into the team rankings was to split the points among the participants of the level. For example, for Arrow Jumble, Harumbai and Yaya brought 2.5 points to each of their respective team rankings. However, for the individual rankings, you get the same number of points as before, as if you made the level by yourself.

Final Pentathlon Rankings

1st GF4: 321
2nd Yaya: 285
3rd Harumbai: 239
4th Livio: 188
5th canadianstickdeath: 169
6th shos: 155
7th soccerboy13542: 150
8th ckjr: 118
9th rosabellis: 108
10th (tied) imtimi: 100
10th (tied) Quirvy: 100
12th Dekudude: 92
13th krotomo: 67
14th guyguyxtreme: 47
15th Teo_pl: 11

Not many people joined the Aeon category this week. CSD was able to skyrocket from 12th place to 5th, thus earning some more points for the KarmaBites.

Since the Pentathlon was a pretty big deal, first place will gives their team 10 points, second bring 9 points, and so on, until 10th place, which brings 1 point.

Final Team Rankings

1st: KarmaBites: 53
2nd: Team GREATS: 52.5
2nd: Ninja Koopas: 52.5

Aw man, this was ridiculously close! Before adding the pentathlon rankings to these, KarmaBites was ahead of Team Greats by only half a point, while Ninja Koopas lagged behind Team Greats by 4 points. Before adding the last point of the Pentathlon winners to this, I noticed that the score was 52--52.5--52.5, and then it turns out that imtimi, of all people, was tenth place and gave the KarmaBites the necessary point to win the IO.

Final Individual Rankings
These rankings do not contribute to the Team Rankings, but here are the individual winners of the IO:

1st: Yaya: 33
2nd (tied): Harumbai: 32
2nd (tied): GF4: 32
4th: soccerboy13542: 19
5th: shos: 15
6th (tied): krotomo: 14
6th (tied): canadianstickdeath: 14
8th: Livio: 13
9th: Ckjr: 11
10th (tied): rosabellis: 7
10th (tied): Woodstock: 7
12th: Dekudude: 6
13th (tied): imtimi: 5
13th (tied): Quirvy: 5
15th: Ang lfish: 3
16th: guyguyxtreme: 1

Another close call, with Yaya winning the IO, and GF and Harumbai tied for second place. If we had counted this into the Team Rankings, perhaps we Ninja Koopas would've won in the Team Rankings.

8/22 Weekly Update

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Quirvy

Since imtimi is still gone (and he's also been removed from the staff) it is again up to me to produce this week's weekly update, despite the fact that I was gone for 2 days.

This week, I don't remember that much happening.

Livio recently made it possible for polls to show up on the topics of levels, videos, news posts, and so on. However, I believe that to place polls in your levels, videos and such, you must manually get to the edit topic page.

Dando released a walkthrough to her super-awesome level, Cause and Effect. That level is so awesome it deserves to receive mention in the weekly update.

Livio wrote a really long newspost marking the end of his summer about what he has and has not accomplished. But you don't really need to be informed about it, because according to the newly added poll in the news post, despite no one commenting on it, it's apparently been fully read by everyone to view the page after the poll was added. Oh yeah, Livio's in college now.

Neezles' has recently made new spam accounts in the past week. This should come to no one's surprise, but it is worth noting that the leaderboard that includes all of the bans has been updated each time a neezle ban has been made, and that a new leaderboard including only the standings and most recently banned user has been added to the header of the random chat topic. Livio and canadianstickdeath have both managed to get their first neezle bans this week, so a big round of applause for both of them!

There has been some progress on judging the final IO competitions, but it's not clear when they will be fully judged. Judging has finished, and results will soon be released.

Post of the Week: Harumbai on shos needing to shut up about rejudging the IO
Fail Post of the Week: Won Ki on something
Level of the Week: Shhnnniissuugaaahh
Video of the Week: Dando's Cause and Effect Walkthrough

THE INTERGUILD:

Spoiler: The Interguild Comic

End of Summer, Progress Report

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Livio

This is my follow-up to the post I made three months ago, entitled Livio's Summer To-Do List. Tomorrow (Saturday), I will be moving into the University of Arizona. I'll be studying Computer Science, but of course, I won't have as much time for the Interguild as before. And now I find myself at the end of my summer.

It was pretty awesome with all the crazy stuff that happened here this summer: the return of a_neezles_a, custom awards and the search for Interbot, the new blogs system, the karma wars, karma nukes, Karmabot, Karmabites, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Koopas, team GREATS, team Judgernauts, and all our other IO shenanigans, the defense against the nezzles-spammings, tons of Aeon artwork progress, imtimi getting added and removed from the staff, D52's breif return, Aeon Demo 3!!, read-topics blowup/recovery, Harumbai getting added to the staff, and making all those last-minute IO entries. Great summer.

About that to-do list, it was clear from the start that it could not be finished. However, I was still able to get a significant amount done, so let's look at each of the major sections of the Interguild and see how well I did in each and how much is left to be done. I tried to express my overall satisfaction with each category using a smiley placed next to the title.

Big Website Features
The biggest items in this category include:

The article system
I got rid of the article system early this summer, and I replaced it with the Blogs system. The idea was kinda weird at first, but it has yielded some great results. The old article system was a constant failure, and we mods used to have at least 2 or 3 articles forever waiting for approval. But now that embarrassing era is behind us. Not only has this new blog system resulted in some great guides such as Harumbai's Creating Lifelike Environments in Knytt Stories and imtimi's SMF Level Design Guide, but also some amazingly creative blog posts such as GF4's The Interguild comic and Yaya's Pwn Dancing: The Lost Art.

However, there still remains some things to be done for this system. The concept is that each user has his/her own "blog" on the Interguild, and even though the posts can be sorted by the staff into various categories of "Noteworthy Blog Posts", the act of following any one user's blog is less than ideal. The user-blog pages (example: jell's blog) are very plain. It would be cool if you could customize your blog page, maybe give it a unique name, and maybe even custom backgrounds and colors (lol hopefully it won't be as disastrous as in the old forums). In fact, perhaps some kind of merge between the user blog pages and profile pages would be a good idea. And I should also set up some RSS feeds so that you could follow individual blogs via RSS, since many real blogs have those.

Or rather than automatically linking everyone's blog posts together by author, as if they were somehow related (which is most likely not the case, given our multi-game nature), perhaps we could let people combine their blog posts together under some kind of "series" system but for blogs, rather than levels. For example, what if you really wanted to follow the State of the Interguild Blog but you couldn't care less about all the other blog posts I write. It would be cooler if this so-called blog had a real blog page, rather than being just another list of noteworthy posts. And allow for Blogs to have multiple contributors to it, as well.

And one final small idea: it would be nice if the news system had some kind of feature where certain blog posts could be displayed on the news page as if it was news. For example, this news post would be a great addition to the State of the Interguild Blog, but I'm posting it as news mainly because it's a follow-up to my Summer To-Do list, which is also a news post but was made before the blog system even existed. I could just post this as a blog post and then make a news post with a big link to it, but that would be very inelegant.

The video archive

Absolutely no progress in this section. But what did you expect? This archive was imported from the old layout, which was imported from the old site, which was programmed by Haily when he was still pretty new at PHP and stuff. After all the waiting and after so much fail, the day that I actually get up and remake the archive will be a miracle to behold. That's not to say I never got close to doing it, though. When I laid out my plan for Level Database Reform, I said one of my goals was to do it swiftly so I could quickly move on to making a better video archive.

Level Database and the Games system

I'm still not done with my current redesigning of the level database, but you can click here to see the work in progress, and you can click here for a more detailed look at the various ideas behind it. The main thing I have left to do before I can release it is to make the "add new game" procedure much easier and more fluid. I was thinking of releasing the new design right after putting this part in, but with the idea of continuing to work on it and get all my ideas implemented. The deadline I set for myself was today, actually, but I decided not to stress myself out and release a rushed system. I also think I may get more things done in the long run if I still feel like I have to get this massive reform done and released sometime soon.

I've been getting plenty of new ideas for the database that I still haven't explained anywhere. However, I will spare you from thinking out loud again, like a few paragraphs ago when I was writing of ways to improve the blog system. But unlike the blog system, hopefully you will see these new ideas implemented in the short term, and there won't be much need for me to explain them so frequently.

Other things around the site:
This section will consist of other site-related issues that are not as big as the previous ones.

Learning Javascript as a Solution for Problems

It turns out Haily bought a JavaScript/Ajax book a year or two ago, so I basically took it from him and started reading it. I didn't learn much javascript, I didn't even get close to doing what I wanted to do with it, but it's something. At least I can say that the new level database will use a bit more javascript (still really simple stuff, though) as well as alternatives for those who do not have it set. It seems, however, that I'm running it all in a deprecated (expired, not recommended) style, but at least it works now.

Here are some of the ideas I would have used javascript for:

Delaying the mouse-out effect for the top-bar items to make the Games tab more user friendly. I have, however, moved the scrollbar away from the edge, which has helped significantly.
Make an auto-refreshing chatbox and other member info. Dekudude actually offered to give me his chatbox from his site ApolloMix. He never got around to doing it, but I was still not satisfied with his solution because he offered no non-javascript alternative.
Make it so when you click on an item under the top bar's Search bar's drop-down menu, it would simply alter the destination of the form, so that you go to the page after you hit "GO", rather than immediately when you click it.

Private Messaging System

The PM system is pretty badly coded and it could use better features. I'm thinking of making it more like a forum topic, where you can see all posts in a conversation at once, rather than just the immediately preceding post. The report-PM system also stinks, but good thing no one cares about that. But of course, none of this was worked on this summer....

Forums

Hey, I got a lot of stuff done in the forums this summer. More than I expected, at least. There was that Forum Reorganization back in June, which turned the forum board setup from a big mess into a very nice and compact layout. There was also those features I added in July: the Read Later button and the URLs for each post (which used javascript in a cool way--but wait a minute, I never added an alternative, did I?? ). I also added Preview buttons for new posts and topics and blogs. However, lately I've noticed slight mess-ups with this feature, especially when you use the [code] BBCode tag. I'll have to fix that.

The Recent Karma Rates page now lets users track which posts are collecting positive and negative karma. A forum search has also been much needed, and even though I didn't get that done, I at least added a mini-search that looks only through topic titles so that you could search the site with it. It's still needs lots of work, though. And just the other day, I added some new BBCode tags. And don't forget about the massive site-wide upgrade to the new "die" smiley.

Member Profiles

I touched on this idea when rambling about the Blog system at the start of this post. Several things need to be added to the profiles, such as blog posts. There was also an idea a while ago about letting people feature their best levels on their profiles, similar to how in YouTube profiles you can feature your best videos.

Advertising
I've stated elsewhere that I stink at advertising the Interguild and that's why we get so little incoming hits. I've been told that doing link-exchanges with other sites could increase traffic, but it seems like the only site I've discussed the idea with is ApolloMix (but hey! we got like three members from them!) I've also stated elsewhere that it would be helpful if someone else could deal with it. I've tried recruiting Haily, but he's always busy with IceCaves.net and those guys aren't exactly our target audience.

However, I am thinking a lot about this as I work on the level database. It's designed to attract/keep the attention of first-time visitors, and to be optimized for search engines when people look for levels of certain games. Even the URL's of the page are nice and user-friendly now. I've even been adding more Share buttons around the site, so you're encouraged to post cool levels and videos on Facebook and stuff. But none of this changes the fact that I still stink at advertising.

Aeon

I feel like I should've devoted more time to working on Aeon, but I have to remind myself that I made great progress this summer. The latest Aeon demo included two huge additions: the level editor prototype and artwork. I also made great progress into the next demo, as well. Remember my new ridiculous XML design? (sorry for the giant images, I didn't know I would carry out the post for so long ). But the community has also made great strides with the game. There were tons of outstanding artwork, great music, and even sound effects made this summer. And many of us thought we'd never make it this far.

Miscellaneous
In response to everything else in my To-Do list that didn't already get mentioned above.

Misc. Things Done
-"write more guides" (even if they were small and simple)
-"delete all the forum topics moved over from the old site, which are just sitting in a secret board, and have been plagued by name-changing glitches. And decide whether we want to move over all those topics again. We may decide that it's not worth it, no one cares, and that it's embarrassing to see how bad our posts used to be."
-"finally reach and hold onto 100 karma. Or just getting past 90 would be good..." (that was some karma war)
-"Create a page that will let the staff edit the Featured Content"
-"Play more levels"
-"Fix all the glitches that are still around from the new layout." (I lost track already of which glitches are a result of this layout, so let's just call this done)
-"make an about-us page" (what? There was actually a time when we didn't even have an about page?)
-"Add email confirmation to the register system." (take that neezles)
-"Add a karma-lock feature that stops people from rating certain users' karma."

Misc. Things Slightly Done
-"fix all the bugs on bug reports" (was this as foolish a dream as the video archive?)
-"Make better, on-time weekly updates" (they got so off-time that we started expecting them on Mondays. But at least they got better.)
-"Make more levels"
-"Make the number of posts per page customizable." (well, I can customize it already, manually? Okay, so maybe this should go in the other category, but I just thought that that list is getting too long......)
-"Add daily post limits on neezles's account." (hey, remember this idea? I guess you could count the staff's neezle-ban leaderboards as limiting)

Misc. Things Not Done
-"Make competition pages look better"
-"Comp-Judging page is just horrible."
-"get the staff to give out awards for those old "Best of 2007" awards, also known as the Caving Elections from the old site." (lol I completely forgot about this)
-"Make a preview generator" for games like FR2, N, SMF, etc.
-"Let staff split topics"
-"Allow forum boards to be locked"
-"Allow forum boards to be semi-locked, where you may post, but not create new topics" (would be good for the Announcements)
-Member Rankings Page needs an upgrade
-"organize to-do list with jell's advice" (sorry jell)
-"Ambitious idea: rebuild the structure of the site with more efficient database tables." (This is such a cool idea, but maybe next summer)
-"Add something that points out upcoming and current birthdays"
-"Make something that will automatically remove the extra spaces at the end of HATPC level codes"
-"Karma-graph to let us see how users' karma has changed over time." (This is quirvy's idea and it's pretty cool. I can't believe I forgot all about it)
-"Make a mobile version of the site."

Okay, this post is big enough now. I think I'll end it.

Weekly Update - 16th of August 2010

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Livio

This week (the upcoming one, not the one that just finished) will be my last week before I go to college. I actually move in on Saturday. And that unfortunately will mean that I won't have as much time for the Interguild anymore. But before I go, I'm gonna see if I can finish level database reform, and that means that it'll be up to the staff (or Harumbai) to add preview images to all the levels. Well, we'll see.

Oh, by the way, Harumbai has been added to the staff. He's in charge of maintaining the featured content now. I even wrote a news post in his honor.

In last week's update, I wrote a lengthy paragraph about all the members that were either missing, or on vacation, or both. To follow up with that, I should mention that Yaya, Isa, and jellsprout have all returned! Yaya returned only to find that his three-arrow cave Threedom was not only impossible, but it won first place in IO Pentathlon Round 3. This further helped shos' argument that the IO comps should be rejudged with more effort put into them.

Meanwhile, no progress was made this week on judging the final IO comps. The reason was largely because no one besides me was available for judging, and as a result, I forgot about it. Remember that Quirvy had refused to judge anymore comps since he can't seem to get very far in many levels, and shos did not seem to want to judge either (or, more likely, he forgot about my offer to let him judge). And Isa and jell still hadn't returned yet. It wasn't until yesterday (Sunday) after jell and Isa had returned that I started judging. In fact, I finished judging the last category just a few moments before writing this post. Now we just have to await input from the other judges and we could post the final medal count.

Since I just finished judging the Collaborative Levels category of the IO, I can tell you that most of the levels were pretty bad, lol. But that makes sense since more than half the entries were last-minute and rushed. However, I was very impressed by Arrow Jumble, a HATPC level by Yaya and Harumbai, and by Level 7: Lava Lair, a Zelda Classic quest by canadianstickdeath with music by Dekudude:

There weren't many new levels this week, and I didn't even play many of them. So I'll just highlight some old levels that probably deserve more recognition:
Team GREATS Collab Level, an SMF level by shos, soccerboy13542, Woodstock, and krotomo.
Immunity II: Bould Choices, a HATPC hold-right DDA with some hidden gem paths.
Bounce, Aeon Demo level by soccerboy13542
And Harumbai's first addition to the featured content, Night of the Dying Alive, an old HATPC level by Quirvy from January 2009:

Only one video was posted this week, but it was still really cool: Stupid Mario Level 5 by rosabellis.

The craziest thing happened on Tuesday/Wednesday. I think I explained it well in this topic, so explaining it again is just redundant. Everything's back to normal now, and the only thing that's changed is that karma and post-counts have been recalculated and changed slightly for some users, after certain glitches were discovered and fixed.

I spent most of my time this week, working on the new level database. You can see a preview of it here, but be warned that the images you see next to levels are being pulled up at random from past featured content images. I'll continue to work on it during these next few days, but some of my latest progress includes the new, friendlier URL's when you click on a game to browse through.

I also added some new BBCode tags to the forums including: a better [url] tag, a [size] tag for font size, and an [s] tag for strike-through text. However, if you were online while I was trying to add these new tags, you probably saw the site blow up a few times.

I haven't made much progress with Aeon, but the_grimace has been contributing several amazing sound effects for the game. Many of the sound effects would definitely have to be put to the test inside the game before we are certain if they are the right ones. I only wish I had more time to work on the game and get it ready for sound as soon as possible.

In other news, earlier today a new member joined named Farmer Dandonovitch. If you don't get the reference, it's because you haven't read this post from 2009 yet. Anyway, upon registering, this mysterious new member then triggered this chatbox conversation:

That Chatbox, which has newest posts on top and oldest on the bottom, said:

Sun. 7:33pm - Isa Livio, this is why you need a better search function
Sun. 7:32pm - Farmer Dandonovitch With a side of some good, good, amazing Heineken.
Sun. 7:32pm - Farmer Dandonovitch And make a pork sandwich outta u.
Sun. 7:32pm - Farmer Dandonovitch Hey noob. I'm ganna steal ur bread 'n wine.
Sun. 7:31pm - Isa This is the best thing I've read in a good while.
Sun. 7:31pm - Isa Ahahaha
Sun. 7:31pm - Farmer Dandonovitch I need to look for mah homie.
Sun. 7:31pm - Farmer Dandonovitch Who are these people?
Sun. 7:30pm - Farmer Dandonovitch And I'm ganna steal all your bread 'n wine.
Sun. 7:29pm - Farmer Dandonovitch I'm Dando's namesake.
Sun. 7:29pm - Kittikiyana Two new users...? Neezles?
Sun. 7:29pm - Farmer Dandonovitch Hey noobs. I'm Farmer Dandonovitch.
Sun. 7:28pm - Farmer Dandonovitch They are destroying all that is good in the world. Some day, we won't have to hide in here. Some day we'll be free again. Free to farm and drink and make levels for Hannah and the Pirate Caves.
Sun. 7:27pm - Farmer Dandonovitch These cursed Nazis.

Anyway, unlike most of neezle's spam accounts, this one was not deleted, but instead sentenced to permanent banning. I imagine this isn't the last we ever see of Farmer Dandonovitch. Also, Isa is right, I really do have to improve that search.

Also, Captain Obvious has recently been spotted on IceCaves.net having an argument with someone who claims to be, but clearly isn't, CSD. The conversation happened in their chatbox, so it's likely to get bumped off soon.

Best of the Week:

Post of the Week: Captain Obvious tells Jell to go to his own Ask topic (there weren't too many positively-rated posts this week)

Fail of the Week: New/Read Posts ~~Reset~~ Fixed!! (lots of negatively-rated posts here)

Level of the Week: Level 7: Lava Lair (don't let the date fool you, it was really finished on Wednesday)

Video of the Week: Stupid Mario Level 5

GF4's Interguild Comic: see spoiler below:

Spoiler: Episode 5

Some New BBCode Tags

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Livio

A while ago I started using my newlyfound understanding of regular expressions to create some new BBCode tags. I already posted about them in the Official Censors topic, but this is news-post worthy.

URL Tag

This is meant to replace the cumbersome url1, url2, and url3 censors put up by the staff. Now all you have to write is this: [url=http://www.google.com]Google[/url], and you will get this: Google. It took me quite a long time to get this to work, since the automatic URL-to-link thing always got in the way.

Strike-through Text

Just write [s]text[/s] to get ~~text~~. There was already a censor for this, but now it's official, and you'll find a button for it when you make a new post.

Custom Font Size

Before you could only use [small] and [large] bbcode tags. But now you can just write this: [size=18]text[/size] and you will get 18px-size font: text. You can change the size to whatever you want. So now there's no need for all those censors that give out bigger text.

Right Curly Brace

This isn't really bbcode, but a censor. As you may already know the right curly brace character: ("}") is often used to end certain censors, and because of that you could never use that character. Well there are two ways you can call this character up. One way is to use the HTML code for the character, which is:
& #125;
Or if you can't remember that, you can use the new censor: :rightcurlybrace:

While there are some censors and past bbcode that are made obsolete with these changes, all of them are going to stay up so that past posts can be protected.

UPDATE (8/16/10): MiniCode Tag

[minicode]text[/minicode] will give you:

text

. It's the same effects as using the [code] tag except that it's inline, rather than giving you an entire box for the text. You can use this to avoid triggering smilies and bbcode. However, you cannot use it in conjunction with the code tag or vice versa, or with the code-highlight tag: [hl]text[/hl] (which isn't new but I just added to the bbcode buttons).

If the minicode tag does not come off as being inline, try pressing Ctrl+F5 so that you can refresh the site's css file.

New Staff Member: Harumbai

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500

Posted by Livio

Imtimi has been replaced by Harumbai. So far he's being relied on solely for featured content.

So yeah, that's it. I just figured we needed to have a news post about this. If you want to learn more about how this happened, read the conversation on the Help Wanted topic.