NEWS -- August 2012
#1
[html]


August 2012 News!
Downtime

Well, we kicked August off with a lovely bit of downtime that also resulted in a hefty hit to our posts, PMs, and everything else. Sad Fortunately, Google Cache was able to rescue many, many posts, and altogether, this really wasn't as bad as it could have been! Here's to hoping we go another five years without any losses. Sad

Fun fact: this isn't the first time something like this has happened to 'Souls! In the 2005 hack/data loss on Ezboard, we were one of many boards affected -- and in some cases we lost a month and a half of posts. D: D: D:

Unfortunately, it seems these things happen, no matter what the service used to host a forum. :C Thankfully -- you guys were really cool about everything, and when we were considering purchasing a VPS or other hosting service to combat this issue for good and all (sadly, it seems this is impossible), we received several donations. Big Grin We're super grateful for the support! <3 You guys are awesome, and we probably won't have to worry about hosting for years now. Big Grin


'SA & Staff Changes

On August 8, James stepped down from the 'SA to a Moderator position due to time constraints and general stress. Unfortunately, this did not sufficiently relieve his stress, and he soon stepped down as Moderator and left the board entirely to remedy this. We wish him well, and thank him for his many years of contributions to our site!


However -- we welcome Raze as our newest staff member! Congratulations on your promotion to board moderator! Lets wish her good luck on her new duties of bringing the 'SA cakes and cookies -- she will need it!

New skins!

We're releasing two new skins -- the new default one is named "A Song and a Silver Throat" (our new default) and the other new one is called "Days of Dust." We hope you enjoy them! Big Grin


Spotlight and Community Soul

Congratulations to Sylvey, winner of Spotlight Soul as Willam and to Bria (Terra, Amy, and many more), winner of Community Soul. For more information, check out the Community/Spotlight Soul thread!



Forum Intro and Description Sprucing

The descriptions and introductions of many forums -- Help and Questions, Requests and Suggestions, Joining, etc. -- have been updated and generally spruced. New links were added here and there, formatting changes were made, and altogether we just made an attempt to make things look nice. c:


New Advertisement

We have a new advertisement available! Big Grin Our old ones haven't been touched for a few years, so we spruced up the BBCode advertisement and also used Kiri's art from our 10th birthday header! Go forth and advertise!


Affiliates Fixed in Firefox

Firefox users might have noticed that many of the affiliate banners in the board footer have been broken for ages. It has baffled us for ages because things are fine in Chrome and even IE, and it only appeared to affect affiliate banners hosted on 'Souls's server. KIRI HAS FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT AND FIXED IT. Firefox users with Adblock were the only ones affected as Adblock auto-blocks all images hosted in a folder named "affiliates." ~_~ As such, these images are now hosted in /aff. So there. Take that, Adblock.


Speech Guide

We've made a minor update to the Speech by Species table on the Speech page to include asterisks on any greater groups of animals with more specific exceptions (e.g., Class Aves (birds) in general are Low Speech speaking, but Family Psittaciformes (parrots) can learn broken high speech.

Hopefully, this will help players differentiate the different types of creatures and their abilities to speak high or low speech. c:


[/html]


Forum Jump: