Improvements to the Website

PHP7 Update
We recently updated from PHP5 to PHP7 which came with a lot of performance improvements for the website. You may find that the website is now working more quickly than it has in the past. The update optimised the database queries on the forum to limit redundant information searches by the website. We've improved how the website links to a specific post, which removes a lot of complexity behind building each page for the forum and makes it more efficient. We also cleared out a lot of old 'website crud' that wasn't doing anything.

Forum
We've made a few changes to the forum itself. The website now remembers which forums you've collapsed on the index page and provides the ability to reorder subforums. Click on the date under the player's name on the last post of a thread will take you to that post. We've added but not yet enabled a tags system that will allow you to filter threads by tag. There's also a subtle shadow on text in the forums to improve readability.

As someone who has looked through thousands of pages of community competition submissions, I'm excited to share that images are now automatically resized to the width of the forum post they're in. This means no more scrolling over for large screenshots, or fussing over image sizes when you're posting.

Private Messages
We've removed the "Recent Messages" section in favour of going directly to your inbox. Private message threads now include users avatars and use an improved layout. We've also added the option to just show important messages.

Avatars
Players with more than one custom avatar can now alternate between these themselves in lieu of having to contact support to make this change. While this only affects a small subset of the community, we are really happy that this change is finally in and look forward to seeing more of these unique avatars around the forum.

Achievements and Challenges
We've separated these features into two separate tabs for ease of use. They now use a layout similar to the in-game user interface. It shows the account's progress towards each achievement or challenge.

Future Changes
We have some more significant features planned for the future. At some point we will add an opt-in Badge system that will be an option for those who want to show off all their supporter pack steez without taking up a huge amount of space under their name on the forum. This will also allow us to add badges for other titles like Valued Poster, Alpha Member and to honour our previous volunteer moderators.

There's a system of notifications planned that players will be able to opt into. This will allow you to receive a notification if someone has replied to you on the forum, quoted you, and eventually we'll add notifications for when someone has replied to a thread you're watching.

There's also a watchlist being added to the shop where you can mark what items you're interested in purchasing at a discount. When the item comes on sale you'll then be sent an email to notify you.


We hope you enjoy some of these small improvements! If you have any feedback for further website improvements you'd like to see, we'd like to hear from you.

We've also been working on some performance improvements for the game that we're finally ready to talk about. Jonathan is currently working on a news post regarding these improvements. We plan for this news to be live tomorrow!