Paril

Some pretty huge refactoring done. Hopefully everybody should see performance improvements across the board! It's possible that some things may not work properly though, if you run into any please file a ticket or ping me here.

This week, finally, a long-time-coming update is coming. I think we're launching today but it depends if we find any more issues.

I've been working on cutting down the number of duplicate systems we have, and my current aim is the commenting systems. We used to have three distinct commenting systems: forums, tickets/walls, resources and items (referred to collectively as submissions). With the last update, we tested the first major move over to the forum reply system, which was tickets. With the next update, submissions will be moved over to the reply system as well, leaving wall posts to be the only area with an old comment system (we will be replacing it next). The new system - which used to be called "forum replies" - is now just referred to as discussions, and will have a consistent UI (except maybe wall posts) across the entire site.

One major bonus with this is that, just like forums, comments will now have quick access to upvotes and better sorting options. In addition, replies in those areas (except tickets) can now be counted for experience points, in the same way that the forums do. This change will be retroactive, and most users will gain a large chunk of experience when the update goes live and we refresh everybody.

Everybody will also be losing a bit of experience, however; comments will be being dropped from counting towards submission experience, and although that balances out with replies counting towards discussion experience, we're also changing the way self-upvotes work. You no longer get 1 automatic self-emerald from discussion posts (and can no longer upvote your own posts), meaning you lose 3 experience per post. The reason for this is internal; it saves us from having an entry in the vote table when 99.999% of discussion replies are going to have this upvote already. The upvote is now implied, and visually you'll see that upvote as being there even though it really isn't. You will now, however, get 3 experience for making a reply rather than 1. You'll have a net loss of 1 experience per post that is now missing (since you used to get 4 total). Since most people will have submission replies gaining them a lot of XP in this update, it's unlikely many people will lose any actual experience points, but just be aware that if you are mainly forum-oriented you may lose a bit of experience with this update.

That's about it for this update. Wall comments will be next to move over to this system, although I'm not sure if they will grant experience yet. Tickets purposefully don't.

I made some big changes to the table bbcode. It should be smaller, and responsive now since it forces % instead of px for widths. Let me know if anybody has any problems with tables.