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Young Writers Society


YWS: Apollo Updates Thread



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Wed Apr 09, 2014 7:54 pm
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Nate says...



Updated the chatbar to the latest version. I think the biggest thing people will notice is that the traditional scroll bar is back. Other than that, it's mostly just server-side fixes. I installed it hoping that the zoom out issue had been fixed, but that appears to not be the case.





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Wed Apr 09, 2014 8:39 pm
Auxiira says...



Is there going to be a change with the Publishing center at some point? It's really hard to get the formatting right, with shift-enter and everything, and being able to indent paragraphs would be amazing...
You read faster than Usaine Bolt sprints xD - Deanie 2014

I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. - Cathy, Wuthering Heights





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Wed Apr 09, 2014 10:04 pm
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Nate says...



@Auxiira, at some point, yes. But please keep in mind that I do not have much spare time for YWS, and what time I do have is spent mainly on making sure the site loads and is moderated well. I wish I had more time for YWS, but I simply do not.





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Tue Apr 22, 2014 7:25 am
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Nate says...



Sorry everyone for the unexpected downtime. I was doing what I thought would be a routine upgrade for the web server, but the upgrade turned out to be incompatible with another program on the server. That brought the site down until I could figure out what was going on.

However, everything should be good to go now. Let me know if you run into any new issues.





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Fri Jun 13, 2014 8:56 pm
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Nate says...



Haven't posted an update for almost two months. A lot has been added in that time:
YWS: Now with TapaTalk! (almost, but not quite, a YWS app)
New Media BBcode: Easily post Youtube videos, MP3s, and more
Brand New People Tab

In addition, there was some very significant tweaking of the server -- especially on the mail server.

Also added several Easter eggs to the new People tab (see link above), and added four cheat codes. For the cheat codes, click here.

Hopefully, the new people tab will be the start of a number of significant updates; I wanted to get it out of the way first since it's a relatively self-contained part of the site, which allowed me to test a lot of new things. The next big update will be to the Publishing Center, with perhaps some smaller updates in between.





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Mon Jun 30, 2014 8:42 pm
Nate says...



Recently upgraded the YWS backup site to the very latest version of phpBB: phpBB v. 3.1.0-RC1. YWS is currently using phpBB 3.0.12.

The big difference upfront is that the v. 3.1 series comes with notifications included in the default installation. Other than that, though, there's not a whole lot of difference from the user's point of view. But from the developer's point of view, the code has been rewritten to make it easier to add custom modifications. There have also been extensive changes to how custom styles are written.

As a result of the code changes, it is unlikely YWS will ever be upgraded to the v. 3.1 series -- there's simply no need to and it would require rebuilding the site from the ground up. But if you're interested in checking out phpBB 3.1 nonetheless, head on over to the backup site:
http://yws.nathancaldwell.com





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Mon Aug 18, 2014 4:32 pm
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Nate says...



A few more changes around the site since the last update.

First, there's the new footer and the return of the generators. The name generator in particular seems to be quite popular!

Second, YWS is now coming to you over an encrypted connection (https). This was done in order to provide greater security to users, and because due to recent developments in https, there is now no speed difference between it and http (which is unencrypted).

Third, you may have noticed that the "Message autosaved" message now says "12:05:30" instead of "12:5:30" as it did in the past. This is due to a code addition by @carbonCore, so please send him your thanks!

Last but not least, RSS has been enabled for almost all forums, and the format of the forum & topic indexes has been slightly changed as well.





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Mon Aug 18, 2014 4:36 pm
Auxiira says...



The RSS made me panic for a second >.<
You read faster than Usaine Bolt sprints xD - Deanie 2014

I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. - Cathy, Wuthering Heights





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Sat Aug 23, 2014 3:09 am
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Nate says...



The About the Authors forum has been removed and all topics relocated to the Welcome Mat. It hasn't received much attention for the past few years with an average of just one new topic per month.

In its place is now a direct link to the FAQ for New Users, which should hopefully give it added prominence.





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Tue Aug 26, 2014 7:34 pm
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Nate says...



Not much of an update; just kind of interesting. Several days ago, I began reporting every attempted spambot registration to the database maintained by stopforumspam.com (the reports are made automatically whenever a known spambot tries to register). Before I set this up, YWS was receiving an average of ~20 attempted spambot registrations a day. About a dozen reports were sent over the next several hours after setting it up, and then the attempted registrations just stopped. Over the past four days, there has only been one spambot attempt. That's about 1% of normal!

Not sure if it's just coincidence or if the spambot programs are configured to not target sites that actively report spambots, but it's nice either way.





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Fri Jan 23, 2015 3:25 am
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Nate says...



Updated the YWS Chat Bar to the latest version of cometchat (the program used to run the chat bar). There's no extra features, so it's not anything special. Nor does it fix the browser zoom bug. Nonetheless, YWS is now fully up to date with regards to the chat bar.

If you encounter any bugs or issues with it, please let me know as soon as you can. It should appear no different than before.





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Tue Feb 03, 2015 5:59 am
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Nate says...



YWS went down from about 5:30 to 5:55 AM GMT on February 3 so as to apply an update to the phpBB forum software, which is what YWS uses. The update is just a security update and is meant to patch some potential vulnerabilities. Most importantly, it removes an annoying big red box from the Administration Control Panel that says "Update Now!".





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Thu Feb 12, 2015 4:28 pm
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LadySpark says...



Out of curiosity, is there anyway that word wars could be archived if they were created but not started after a certain number of hours? There are a lot of word wars in the 'current' section that were created but never started.
hush, my sweet
these tornadoes are for you


-Richard Siken


Formerly SparkToFlame





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Mon Mar 02, 2015 3:17 am
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Nate says...



YWS had its first server crash in over two years today. Looking into what happened, but if you were getting a Cloudflare error message for about an hour, it's because the server had a kernel panic.








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