Welcome Back! New Features of the RPGN Forums

[Locke Cole]

Hey folks!

Our forums have been sleeping for a long time now. We had to shut them down for awhile due to all the spam bots infesting the boards. We have upgraded to a newer version of our forum software, added some increased anti-bot protection, and gave the forums a bit of fresh paint.

On top of that as you have noticed, its a clean slate. All the forum posts have been cleared, forum areas re-organized. I have also reset the RPGN Arcade and added some new fresh games! With a fresh start, everyone has a chance to rack up some high-scores! We will also be hosting some gaming tournaments again, if people get interested.

Anyways, I'm glad to see you're reading this. Welcome back! I hope you decide to stay and give us another go.

Check out the second post for an outline of new features added to our forums

[Locke Cole]

New features and stuff on the RPGN Forums:

Increased anti-bot and anti-spam protection
We have added some new methods to stop spammers in their tracks, including a new layer of captcha as well as joining forces with StopForumSpam.com. They keep a huge database of known spammers and bots, and our registration now checks against these lists to help keep them out. We also contribute to these lists as we ban spammers on our boards! Let's hope these new measures help keep things clean.

Private Message Restrictions and Notifications
Another quick change to stop PM spam is a new restriction that requires everyone to have at least 5 posts on the forums before they can send anyone else a private message. This does not block you from messaging admins and moderators, if you need technical help.

Also, now when you gain a rank promotion on our boards you will be notified by a simple level up message, sent by PM. Just a little congratulations notice in case you didn't see you gained rank!

Arcade Expansion and Upgrade
I have upgraded and tweaked our forum Arcade to fix a few of the scoring bugs we use to have, as well as added a pile of new games. We currently have over 100 games in our library, and I hope to add new games as we go. There is now also a dedicated forum to bragging about high scores, setting up tournaments, sharing tips and reporting any bugs or problems with our games. Let's have some friendly competition!

Picture Albums Directory
There is now an easy way to browse user's picture galleries on our boards. If you click the 'Community' link in the top bar, and select 'Pictures & Albums' it will bring up a listing of everyone who has a gallery posted. You can also browse through galleries easier, simply clicking on a picture will advance the gallery to the next image, no need to click the 'next' button.

New Emoticons
I haven't gone crazy adding new sprites to our boards, but we do take suggestions if you would like any to be added. The new ones I have added so far are from Super Mario World. You can view the whole collection of emoticons on our forums by clicking the 'More' link to the right of the advanced editor, or 'View all smilies' in the dropdown box.



New BB Codes
We have two new custom bbcodes available on our forums for you to add to your posts. The first is an mp3 player, which will play any .mp3 file from a location you provide. You can use this by typing:



Second is a Youtube code to allow you to embed a video player right into your posts. No need to make a link that opens another window to check out your videos. To use this one, type:



The code that goes between the [yt] tags is the video tag from the Youtube url. For the example above,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CvnZBPUYA&etc....
would be the URL you find on Youtube. You only need the part after v= and before the first &.

[Nall]

[jetblue]

yay locke and forums back

[fighter5345]

Originally Posted by Locke Cole

Increased anti-bot and anti-spam protection
We have added some new methods to stop spammers in their tracks, including a new layer of captcha as well as joining forces with StopForumSpam.com. They keep a huge database of known spammers and bots, and our registration now checks against these lists to help keep them out. We also contribute to these lists as we ban spammers on our boards! Let's hope these new measures help keep things clean.

If only it worked against the new ones

[Locke Cole]

Originally Posted by fighter5345

If only it worked against the new ones

Actually, some of the anti-spam mods are so old I had to disable them as they were blocking legit sign-ups. I check the forums daily and remove spam manually now.