Full Measures

I haven’t updated the blog in a while but I thought now would be a good time to get back into the swing of it with the site ready to go out to a mass audience. This weekend was set to be one of development but has instead become more of a trawl through paperwork than I hoped. Still, it’s been a useful exercise because now I have the peace of mind that I know exactly where I stand with the majority of the site and some protection of my content. Still need to verify a few details but nothing that should hold me back.

As far as readiness goes all of the major site bugs are now ironed out barring a couple. There’s an issue with javascript not working in some browsers that is problematic and another issue with newly registered posters seeing posts that were made before their join date being marked as unread (just in a couple of places, not site-wide).

The major thing for me now is the look and feel of the site and I’m progressively going to reformat each of the pages to a much more flexible and dynamic structure. With this set up it will allow for a range of better layout options which I hope to steadily install in the admin CP. One of the main things I’m going for with the site is customisability. I want people to have the site exactly as they want to see it and I want those options to be easy. So many sites require hacks and scripts to get things exactly as you want them. I think it’s much better to have all the options easily accessible in your forum control panel.

I will be updating more and more as I progress and I’ll begin to create some threads on the support forum ready for the first real users. Hopefully we can get a good general discussion going on there as well. It’s nice to be able to speak to people directly and to have a place to talk in general. I want it to  be a fairly laid back atmosphere and forego a lot of the formalities that I usually see with major forum providers.

Here’s hoping the transition goes smooth. Watch this space for some updates. It’s an exciting time for NDim.

Skin Builder

Well after much toil the skin builder was finally released. This is the first release so it’s likely to undergo a lot of changes from this point onwards. It’s fairly powerful whilst maintaining a simple interface. I’m fairly pleased with it. Although I do plan to expand it later it’ll serve a purpose for the time being in that it will allow people to customise their forums during the early days.

Not much else to say really. This is the only feature I’ve been spending my hours on. A few bug fixes occurred along the way but nothing that was very noticeable. Mostly in the adding poll screen. Now that this is out of the way I can focus on some more core issues such as the terms of service which is still quite absent. I’ll be drafting up the first edition soon and posting it on the site along with an agreement box on registering a new board. In addition to that I plan to renovate the home-page a little and put some time into the support boards.

New feature-wise, I’ll be devoting the next couple of weeks to flood control and password protected forums which have been held off for too long. There are some brand new features in the works which will add a little something. One I’ll talk about is the stats panel which will allow users to view various forum statistics, including top posters of the day and an average daily post count. This will again, be something that advances over time.

Stay tuned for more soon. This was a huge undertaking and now it’s developed I feel confident that the next few updates will be a lot more frequent. New features should be coming your way in no time.

New and Upcoming Features

The mafia is going reasonably well. Added a few more features and made more changes to the board structure than I can even recall. A few bug fixes here and there and a few prominent issues come to light. All in all though things are running nicely. I’ve added a new posts per member feature to each thread where you can see a breakdown of posts by member and a count for each.

I spoke to Chris from Thunder Arcade today. I originally spoke to him some time ago about the prospect of getting a version coded for N-Dim but lost track with my development schedule and the project fell through a little. Speaking to him today he is eager to get back into it, as am I so hopefully in the not too distant future we can have an arcade coded for the forums. It’ll be a nice feature and thunder arcade is a great extra.

One of the primary issues admins of the forums have so far come back to me with is the skinning. It uses CSS only which is tremendously confusing and only serves to allow professional designers to make new skins. Given there are only two functional skins coded for the forum so far (Next Dimension and a skin created by Malion who I know from various forums), this is problematic to say the least. So in encouraging more flexibility I have started work on a skin builder. It will be intuitive and allow for a wide variety of skins to be created. The source code can then be shared with the community to make things even easier.

I’m also pushing to get password protected forums in place very soon. It’s a feature I’ve been putting off for ages, mostly because the forum structure is pretty difficult to negotiate as it’s currently coded. I could do with finding ways to simplify it but it will do for now. Maybe I can get into password protected forums next weekend. We’ll see.

No regular update cycle yet, though I have started testing new features in the background before making them live. If you see any “server 500″ errors come up I apologise, it’s because a page is being updated. I will get to creating a proper error message screen soon that will just advise a refresh. If you see that, hitting refresh won’t lose any data. Like I say, updates will settle down but it’s far too hectic with so much demand for these features that I can’t afford to wait a week or so between updates.

All in good time. For now, hopefully things are stable enough to enjoy.

Mafia Woes

It’s been pretty hectic making sure everything stays smooth for this mafia game I’m running. If you’re curious (doubt anybody reads this yet but it’ll be nice for later reference) here’s the forum http://www.ndimforums.com/pandimic/

A few things have been sorted and fixed solely for the game:

- You can middle-click next and previous page to open in new tabs. You couldn’t do this before

- An issue with jumping to latest post in firefox has been resolved

- Thread navigation is now above and below the thread in opposite corners

- Members posting feature on threads shows who is posting at the moment so they don’t just drop off the list

- Fixed a bug whereby the members viewing on threads and forums was capped at a 15 minute cutoff. Now uses the default board settings.

- Fixed a number of permission mask issues whereby people couldn’t view and post properly in forums they were allowed to see

- Added a new [center] BBtag for centring text

- Fixed it so avatars that do not have http:// at the start default to that

- Fixed it so badly formed avatars bring back an error message

- Fixed the admin CP for managing members where it was selecting masks that member did not have. Now just selects the right masks.

- Number of pages now appears

- Solved a bug on the active thread list causing change pages to appear where not necessary.

- Made it so that guests can see beyond page a certain point in the thread it was blocking them from seeing beyond.

- Fixed a number of issues preventing proper use of the quote buttons

There is probably more and I doubt I’m in the clear yet. I will stay vigilant and be prepared to add more as it comes.

 

PaN-DIMic: Final Days

I’m currently hosting a mafia game. It will be the first live running forum that the site has save for the support board which is still vacant. The game is called PaN-DIMic: Final Days and it is the first game in a trilogy. It’s a great opportunity to test out the forum software as well as to test a new mafia idea I have.

Already I am noticing a few key missing features and page bugs which I will be rolling out before the game begins. I’m more fond of doing scheduled upgrades as this eliminates most problems, however in this case I will make an exception. Though the features will be tested externally first. No more live testing as I decreed.

Most key of all is the lack of the option to turn off incrementing post counts in forums, something which I actually need for this game. And as the game can’t commence without it properly I have no choice but a quick impromptu coding session. There are a few graphical glitches coming up and I will roll out fixes for those as the game progresses.

Faster Page Load

Well it took some doing but after a day’s chaos everything has finally levelled out nicely and the update worked.

What it essentially boils down to is that the tremendously complicated redirection routine I wrote for handling forum URLs was causing a massive slowdown on page loads. I didn’t realise this was so much of an issue when I was just running a couple of forums but post-release, with more boards in the back-end it became quite noticeable.

I had to completely trash that routine painful as it was to do so. I was really quite proud of it for it’s ingenious complexity. But that’s the way it goes in this business. You can spend weeks writing complex code only to destroy it completely in a later upgrade cycle for the sake of performance. RIP redir.asp, you did me well and you got me to release but we have to go our separate ways. Everything with page loading is now done on the server so it doesn’t have to call up a separate page each time you load something. This makes it more streamlined and there is no longer an obvious white space between pages.

It looks nicer. I’ve reworked everything including domain name handling and websites to make use of this new feature. I’ve also changed the way the start of URLs are processed. Beforehand, if you had a domain name it would remove the www. and would insist on keeping it on the ndimforums domain name. It now keeps the www. on any domain name. The reason why I enforce this is because it actually allows you to log in twice if the www. is removed which would lead to all manner of issues when the site grows…

It’s been a painstaking day coding in intense heat. I’ve done little else aside from cleaning my hamster cage and a brief pause to read up on a number of Wikipedia articles ranging from CTRL-ALT-DEL to Amy Winehouse. At one point I was getting close to the end when I accidentally copied across the “working” set of files and overwrote the new URL handling routines I’d worked long and hard on. Needless to say I was not best pleased. I will have to be more vigilant in the future.

Another upside to this new URL routine process is that the loss of the overly complex page loading means that I can actually push out new pages faster than ever. It was reaching a point where creating new pages was a rather painful process that involved more thought than was really necessary. This has actually served to simplify it, meaning upgrades will be faster in the future.

Hopefully this will be the last update I push out untested on the live service. It’s not something I enjoy doing and as active forums start to hopefully use the service, I don’t want to give them any downtime. Here’s hoping the new page loading is a marked improvement overall.

- Paulus

Testing

I  am currently rolling out a new upgrade.

All future upgrades will be fully tested before they are rolled out but in this case I will be rolling out untested code for some part. It’s an absolutely vital upgrade so it needs to be done in this case only. It shouldn’t happen again unless something is holding up the actual running of the software.

Thanks for your patience,

Paulus

Site officially opened

Hey there.

Just wanted to officially announce the opening of my new free forum hosting service, N-Dimension forums.

It’s been a long hard road to develop this far. I kickstarted the project back in January and I’ve worked pretty solidly since that time to make this release. Technically speaking I announced the release of the forum mid last week, but some parts of the site were still out of action. Today I will be opening everything, including this blog.

I came up with the idea of running N-Dimension during a conversation with somebody online from another forum. Because I was being fairly scarce with posting and updating the site a joke was made about how the other forum staff weren’t paying me to goof off. I retaliated by saying that I wouldn’t need to work at all if I got paid for sitting around and posting on forums. This clicked something off in my mind; my full time job was the creation and maintenance of large real-time web database systems and a forum is a large, rea-time web database system. So I figured that I could probably own the site that ran the forum and make all the money from ad revenue myself. Curiously, I got to coding a page.

At this early stage it was really more about just seeing if I could physically do it. I’d wanted to write forum software for a long time. I thought that maybe I could try my hand at the creation of a whole forum network. That first page was a textbox in which you could enter a post. Hitting send, “posted” the message and the page reloaded. Above the text box was a list of all the posts which had been made so far. I saved that page as thread.asp and it was the first of what would be many. From there I gave people the option to enter their name, to collect all of the posts in a single thread…and it just grew.

As development went on I became more focused on the idea of a community based forum service and this is where it stopped being something I was doing out of interest with the vague goal of profit to something much more interesting and exciting to me. I am a prolific forum dweller and long time poster. I’ve been on many forums over the years and one of the more fascinating aspects to me is that every forum derives from a community. These communities do not necessarily all stick to one message board; more often than not they are spread over several. Some posters are known on multiple message boards and thus the community is loosely wide-spread.

It struck me that in creating my own forum service with it’s own “rules” I could make this aspect the priority. This is the basis of N-Dimension forums. The title stands for New Dimension. It’s based around the theory of parallel or alternate dimensions whereby a bunch of different “universes” are similar but separate, never crossing over. N-Dimension is set to bridge these gaps and create one enormous forum community, loosely related across a number of message boards.

For now, the software is a fairly standard message board host with most of the key features but this is where my passion lies. Over the coming months I will be developing more and more features geared towards realising this dream and connecting the community in new and interesting ways.

Part and parcel of the community driven process is letting the members in on everything, and this is where the blog will come in. This is a working development blog in which I will be commenting on the development process, up and coming features and community events and more. If you’re interested in how the site is progressing, check back here often.

Many forum providers shut the members out of the development cycle and they often have to wait weeks or months until new features are rolled out. I intend to allow people to have their say in what is being developed and as such I will be striving to include one popular community request into every update cycle. More on this will be posted later. I don’t intend to run as a phantom figure in the dark, but as a member of the community offering my advice and support on a more personal level.

With all of that said, enjoy the service. And watch this space for more news.

- Paulus