Black Raven Dragoons

As you have discovered at the time of this writing, we've made some pretty extensive changes to the forums. We've updated the software from phpBB2 to phpBB3. We have also applied a heavily customized style (based off the "prosilver" style that ships with phpBB3) as the default. As with any changes--particularly with anything I've touched--there's likely to be some bugs. Specifically, you should expect to see some weird display bugs in this style from time to time until we have things ironed out. As it stands, most icons and pretty much everything else have been updated to match the current style. Some icons, notably the ones that appear in the upper right such as print, font size change, and so forth, have not been updated and look a little out of place. That will change in the coming days, but we still have a great deal of work to do along with the implementation of some useful surprises.

Display bugs you should watch out for are mostly related to the stylesheet. Prosilver does things a little funky, so if you see anything that looks like white text on a light backgrounds, please report it here along with any relevant URLs. Attaching a screenshot might be helpful but certainly isn't required.

The forums now also support RSS+ATOM feeds (hi Killem!) for those of you who like to have access to your news like that. You can either subscribe individually to each forum or follow the feeds associated with this site. If your reader isn't picking them up, here they are:

Generic feed for the site
Feed for new topics only
Feed for active topics only

To make things a little easier, I'll be adding some icons to the top of the forum somewhere for you to use to quickly access each of these feeds

Also, if you absolutely cannot stand the new theme, don't worry! You can still revert it back to something similar to what you're used to. To do that, go to your user control panel (the link is at the top) and click on "Board Preferences" then change "My Board Style" from "prosilver-goons" to "subsilver2". Be aware that subsilver2 is slightly broken due to some mods I applied to the forum. I haven't had a chance to fix it, but I'll get around to it. "prosilver" is the default theme that ships with phpBB3, if you're the adventurous sort and would like to poke around with everything. Neither of the themes outside of "prosilver-goons" have been branded by us yet, but that's a work in progress. All themes should work reasonably well in most major browsers. I've tested IE8, Firefox, Opera and Chrome, but there's no reason they shouldn't work in everything else (except IE6). If you're using an unusual web browser, just keep in mind that some things might break.

As always, post any issues you're having here. phpBB3 is a pretty significant leap upward from what we were using, so if you're having trouble finding your way around, just give us a shout and we'll see what we can do! If you're familiar with commercial software like vBulletin, you'll probably find some features to be fairly similar.

Enjoy the changes.

I caught a couple of posts that weren't correctly converted when we did the initial update some weeks back. In particular, Turus' post on the Ruby Sanctum was showing bare BBCode for some reason, and I had a post with fonts that had weirdly been changed to size=1400 (as in 1400%). If there's anything odd that you happen to catch in the interim, post it here. We really need to catch some of these issues since they're growing far more difficult to find and much less numerous.

All World of Warcraft-related forums have been moved into a subforum of The Gaming Forum. Some cleanup may still be needed, but it seems appropriate to me to pull it off the index and place it where it won't add to extra clutter.

Makes sense to me given that we haven't seriously played it for an extremely long time. Several years now, hah!

Wow lost 14% of subscribers in the last quarter!

Free to play games/games with no subscription are probably partially to blame for that decrease besides WOW's other short comings over the years. We will soon find out what project titan is so Blizzards new game may or may not help them keep subscribers in some form or fashion. We shall see!

I've bumped the policies and goonisms forums into The Guild. While it's useful to have our policies visible to everyone, we've not been a WoW guild for quite some time. No sense really keeping it there.

I've also created a new forum, the Technology Lounge, and will direct my tech-related posts there rather than cluttering up General Chat with it. You're more than welcome to follow suite.

Actually, that's a good idea. I should move some of the tech topics out of General Chat so that they're easier to find.

You watch... three weeks from now, all those posts will wind up back in General Chat and it'll be merged.

I've done a little extra housekeeping and found a few old threads that were stuck in The Gaming Forum, subsequently moving them back into General Chat where they belong. Further, I've split off another subforum under The Gaming Forum category as "Ye Old Classics." It contains, as you may have inferred from the title, discussions related to classic games. I believe I may have pulled most of the older posts out and pushed them into the new forum, but there's always the likelihood that I might have missed a few.

It's odd to consider, but one day World of Warcraft will be considered an "old classic," since it's coming up on 10 years. Although, I think the defining contrast lies in the fact that it's still very actively developed and quite current, whereas most non-MMO titles from the time period have long been abandoned and their studios defunct.

I've changed user registration to use the GD plugin instead of reCAPTCHA. Appparently reCAPTCHA has been cracked once more.

If spam registrations pick back up, I'm going to temporarily reset it to admin-approved sign-ups.

User registrations have been changed back to use reCAPTCHA for the time being.