Site Upgrade Notices

[ackme]

I will be upgrading parts of the site from Tues~Thurs. The site might be down from time to time and it may look odd at times. I have everything backed up though so even if it gets completely pooched it can be reverted back to how it stood on Monday night.

[ackme]

Sorry, update has been delayed. It's shaky to upgrade from this version. I have mirrored this site so I can work on it safely. When that site is 100% and all the posts/ids work I'll switch the two.

[ackme]

1. Main site code has been updated to the retail version, and licensed.
2. Sidebar has been added
3. Poll option has been added to sidebar (will take the last one in ASK members discussion, don't post a poll there unless it's relevant)
4. Some anti spam measures have been added

I'll post more as they are added

[ackme]

5. New blank avatar
6. Back code for facebook integration
7. New favicon
8. Base facebook application framework

[nemesis]

very nice. I like it very much

[ackme]

9. Unified picture album viewer
10. Menu item to access unified album
11. Reupload and process of old pictures (at 800px)
12. Integrated Youtube gallery
13. Access Permissions for video upload
14. Forum link generator for new video posts.

[ackme]

15. Youtube code generator from links
16. Youtube HD support
17. Video Sidebar
18. ASK Information area
19. Import of relevant site information into ASK area from Ghosts site
20. Fixed user titles for some full members
21. Added flier download to side menu

... and DONE! Overall about 15~25 hours of work but I think that takes care of the site. PLEASE tell me asap if anything doesn't work. I've turned the board backend code into Swiss cheese but I think it's stable

[ackme]

21. Added 'Join a Team' in the main team's page to make it easier to find a team.
22. Changed picture defaults so users can have a larger total image count (only for certain groups) from 100 => 99999
23. Tweaked some forum and group permissions
24. Deleted the double Anyang Ghosts group (one was nothing with no members)

ps. I'm going to keep adding here indefinitely for reference and so you can see what the site changes are.

[TAN]

Thank you for doing all these for us, Chris..

Good job.

[nemesis]

thank you. You spending much time for ASK and for us. I wish I could help you. If you have something that I can do, you can ask me.

[ackme]

Your welcome :)

@ Nemesis, your already helping a lot by ordering stuff for people. Thanks to you too.

25. airsoftlife.com now shadows this site.
26. single pic size limit changed to 2megs to allow for better quality and max quality jpegs (10~12)

[ackme]

27. Removed album max pics restrictions
28. Added php.ini file to override server script timeout settings. This should solve the problem of the site always timing out when you try to upload pics, it's still best to resize them to 1600X1600 1st though

[ackme]

29. Further updated php.ini so it should never timeout on file upload
30. upped the number of embedded images per post to 20


this should allow after action reports to have more pics in the post
You can now post your team rank or whatever files into the forum (if you need a higher pic limit let me know)

31. Upped the PDF limit to 50M per file, there were requests to post larger pdf files.
32. Upped other file attachment limits (jpg 2M,doc 10M,zip 10M)

[ackme]

33. Added reCAPTCHA support to make it harder for spammers to register (I hope)

reCAPTCHA is a very cool little project because it's actually helping to decipher real books.

What is CAPTCHA/reCAPTCHA?:
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

http://recaptcha.net/images/sample-ocr.gif

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
"

[ackme]

34. Removed reCAPTCHA, got twice the spammers
35. added an extra step to signup, should defeat ocr hammers
OCR (optical character recognition) hammers are when bots (auto programs) try over and over filling in stock information and try to read the picture in the image verification window now they have to answer a skill testing question (3 letter name for the site), only a person could do that.
36. Added "Invite Friends" to menu bar

[MonkeyMan]

i thin we have a spamer zkca1nglo9

[ackme]

Banned and posts deleted, thanks for the info.

[ackme]

37. All registered members who have posted 3 or more times (constructively) have now been promoted to full member. If you are not a full member and wish to be please post here. I have also approved all legitimate join requests from Lancer, Recon, and Ghost team. Team captains should check their groups for new members.

[ackme]

38. Small but big change. User IDs have been reworked so those who have played 5 or more times in Korea now have the status 'Established Member'. This ID now gives you access to the 'Senior's Lounge' forum. This class now replaces the 'Senior Member' ID class.

[ackme]

Everything's pooed up right now and I know the logo looks like crap. I redid the whole thing in a new version, I'll get the pics and other stuff up soon.

[nemesis]

man this looks so cool
you did good job

[ackme]

New theme is sort of working, what do you think?

A lot of the features I modded on the old site are not working right now (video gallery, shared picture gallery, etc). I'll have them up as soon as I can.

[nemesis]

It looks much better than previous one

[ackme]

39. Upgraded to Vbulletin 4.0
40. Ported content
41. Customized theme
42. New ASK logo
43. Added sidebar to make it easier to see latest posts
44. Added tag cloud and started populating tags

[ackme]

Sweet, picture galleries are finally integrated and working, look at the 'Gallery' link at the top. A lot are still missing and a few albums have disappeared so I'll try to fix that up soon. You are now free to upload your pictures and at least have a chance of someone finding them :)

45. Installed picture and album integration hack
46. Added 'Gallery' main item and sub items to top menu

[ackme]

47. Added new anti-spam management
48. Upgraded core to 4.05 (last version available before upgrade license expired)
49. Changed 'ASK News and Announcements' forum so only Senior Member and up can post new topics (anyone can reply)
50. Added core for more advanced anti-spam management (buggers up the ability for some members to legit post so disabled for now)
51. Purged spammer IDs
52. Site Backup and DB boxed for server relocation (not working properly on the new server so it's still on the old one, think the upgrade might have solved it)

[ackme]

53. Added Akismet and StopForumSpam API keys with Spam-O-Matic.
54. Enabled all anti-spam services and purged user list of ALL users who have not posted.

NOTE: PLEASE PM ME IF YOU CAN'T POST OR IF YOUR POST GETS AUTO DELETED WITH THESE NEW SETTINGS AND BOTS!

The new anti spam measures are pretty brutal but I don't think they will affect legit users. Please PM me if there are any issues.

EVERY user that hasn't posted on ASK has been deleted but not banned. I know I deleted a bunch of legit users who have never posted but they can reregister if they still want to use the site.

If I deleted your ID I'm sorry but you can sign up again under the same ID with the same email, needed to be done to clean the forum of all potential spammers.