Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays)!

23rd Dec 2013

I probably won't get a chance on to get on after today, so just wanted to wish everyone on the metal box a Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays if you prefer)!

Have a good one, and indulge yourself!

See you in 2014,
Steve

Hidden comments

20th Jul 2013

Suggestions now show only the last 100 comments by default. If there are more than this you'll see a link under the comments header to load in the rest of them.

This is aimed at making pages like the spam page more usable on a phone.

[suggestion_6288]

Cheers!
Steve

Upgrade to PHP

6th Sep 2012

Lunarpage will upgrade the server on sept 11th. There shouldn't be any issues, but if there are, I will fix them asap.

Answered some of the messages

2nd Aug 2012

I answered some of the messages today. The ones that are left now are ones that require me to take some action before responding.

Apologies to everyone who wrote in for having to wait so long for a response.

btw after deleting the spam infested sites, I had expected the traffic to go down. But it hasn't - we're still getting 63,000 visitors per month. So it looks like those could be real people.

Who'd have thought! Real people! On the net!!

Deleted the Metal Box!

24th Jun 2012

It's ok just being unneccessarily alarmist :)

I actually deleted tmb14 which was the drupal site (remember that?) It had been taken over by spammers.

Whoops! Serves me right for leaving an old install of Drupal 5 hanging around on the net with no updates.

The alarm was raised when I realised we were getting nearly 80,000 vistors per month. While I was initially very pleased, I was somewhat suspicious given that at it's height, this site used to get around 40,000 per month, and just before christmas it was around 25,000 (as it has been since I stopped working on it full time).

Anyway a small bit of investigation revealed that most of the traffic was to tmb14 and consisted mainly of crawlers!

Dear o lor. Well anyway, I had a big clear out - deleted tmb14 and took the liberty of doing away with the bugs site as well (an old Mantis install). I want to handle bugs in this site anyway.

So hopefully we can start to gather some real stats again. 25,000 vistors per month is not bad all things considered, but I still have intentions of pushing those numbers up.

Btw this site is offically tmb08a. I have made several aborted efforts to do a replacement site, but trying to replicate the functionality in this one always takes too long. Instead I decided a couple of years ago to focus on improving this site, rather than trying to replace it.

MR 2 scoring fixed

19th Oct 2011

MR 2 scoring is fixed. Or at least I think it is.

Any problems please let me know

Changes to the Website

7th Nov 2010

I have been making some modifications to the website, including re-organising the abilities system. If you have any problems please try logging out and logging in again.

If you still get problems please let me know in the comments of the suggestion link to below.

Papercuts
On the suggestion page, if no suggestion is selected (eg. if someone clicks the icon on the home page) it now show the suggestion with the most recent comment.

On the make_suggestion page, the HTML help table was added, and the big red box warning what not to post was taken away.

Also, I added a new suggestion sub-type 'Bug'

On the contact page, the link to the old bug system was removed.

Bug fixes
Users with apostrophes in their name can now post comments without upsetting the system.

Re-organise abilities
Abilities were previously stored as a delimited string, now they have their own table and a join table to assign abilities to members. This is a background change and shouldn't affect your experience.

Member CV Page
Abilities are now displayed on every member's CV page.

A summary of your road map activity also displays here now, along with a link which shows that member's road map.

A reminder, you can view any member's CV by clicking on their name on one of their comments or suggestions.

Comment can be posted here [Suggestion_6880]

Because people were still registering..

3rd Nov 2010

As people (who aren't ad bots) have been registering to the old invisionfree forums, I've turned off the admin validation again so that the forums will actually be functional for people who want a place to chat asides from the suggestion comments. Took me about ten months of backlogged validation accounts to realize not everyone was a bot :X...

Enjoy if you will,
Lokey57

P.S: Yes, I return for the...fifth, sixth...heaven knows how manyth time.

Add to Roadmap

26th Sep 2010

I have a done a fairly major update to the site - if you spot any problems or error messages please let me know.

The biggest thing is that you can now add suggestions to your own personal road map. I especially would like ♪ to add any suggestions he has worked on / or is working on and mark as done as appropriate. This will ensure he gets the credit for his hard (and excellent) work. Otherwise, it'll look like I did it.

Whenever you log in you'll see a summary of changes that have happened in the road map since your last login. If you click on a member name, the display will group by member instead of by action.

You can also adjust the date (and time) that the website show new things from. Handy if you have to log out some day before you've read everything.

I should mention as well that even when suggestions are marked as done, they won't change to used. For that, they have to be marked as 'merged' and only I can do that (and I haven't given myself a tool to do it with yet!)

I have given the add to road map ability to everyone who is currently a comment approver.

Comments here [suggestion_6793]

Why the site was down

10th Jun 2010

The site was down because it was hacked. The hack involved replacing index.php and config.php (files which can be supposed to exist in any php application) and uploading new files named core1.php core2.php etc

I have no idea what the hack did, or what the hackers purpose was. However, they do not seem to have done any damage to the database, so perhaps they were looking for email addresses to add to their spam lists.

I am extremely limited for time at the moment and cannot investigate this as I would wish to.

I'll make a suggestion where we can discuss what to do about this.

[suggestion_6663]