The new chat absolutely does not work for me. None of the buttons work, and nobody can see anything I type.

Okay, an update:

With Firefox on a Mac: I get in, and I see others' words, but nothing works for me. I cannot say anything, and none of the buttons work.

With Safari on a Mac: The chat will not even load.

With Firefox on my Windows XP Machine: 403 Forbidden error.

With Opera on my Windows XP Machine: 403 Forbidden error.

With IE on my Windows XP Machine: 403 Forbidden error.

Extremely broken.

Were you able to get on earlier today? Can you try to create a new account and see things work differently?

I am having the same problems as GMoT. Firefox lets me connect, but I can't see any text I send through. I can't connect at all with the latest version of IE.

Okay, now I'm getting in with Firefox on the Mac and the PC. The link from the front page of N Prime is broken. I've been clicking on the link you posted further upthread.

I get in fine with Internet Explorer, but only if I click that upthread link. The link from the front page of N Prime is broken for me as well.

I'm at a loss. I copied the exact same folder that everyone has been using all day and placed it in the location of the existing chat. I replaced the link to go to the test forum for now.

The server crashed last night. As a result I'm going to have to do something different with the chat software.

Everything looks to be all aces, now. Glad to see both the server and the chat are in perfect working order. Thanks a mil for all the work in getting it working good and proper.

Cool. I am still working on some other variations of the chat, but I'm glad to hear that things are working for the most part with the current setup.

I don't know if it's just me, but the new category for the M&M game is lit up like there are unread messaged in there no matter how many times I read them.

Thanks.

I think it is because I moved another post into the forum. Once I checked out the looking for players post it went away for me.

Nope, just went in to both topics in that thread, and it's still showing as having unread messages.

It works for me and a couple of other logins I tested, but something isn't allowing it to update your account.

Okay, the new chat has one weakness... server kicks.

Seems that the chat sometimes locks up. I don't know why, but it does.

The new chat is going to have to go. It is killing the server resources. I'll have an alternative or 2 in the next week.

Is that what's causing the boards to be down the last couple nights?

Yeah, the chat is crashing the server.

The flash chat that I tested previously is now the primary chat. We'll test it again for a while and see how it performs and how people like it. You will have to register to use it.

The flash chat is great overall. Is there a listing of keyboard commands for it, though?

The keyboard commands don't seem to be that much with this version. They were almost all moderator related. I'll continue to test it and see what I can come up with.

The forum software has been updated. Below are a few of the changes that you may care about.

• Passwords should now be recoverable for all acounts.
• Added an option in the user's preferences so they can choose to enable/disable relative timestamps (5 minutes ago, Yesterday @ 2:00, etc).
• Added a set of images in the control panel for user selectable moods. Added the user's current mood next to their username in the header. Clicking on the mood in the upper right allows the user to change their mood. You can't hide from Who's Online and still display your mood.
• Finished with a basic GD image class that will be used for CAPTCHA. Hopefully this will decrease spam.

I like what's happened to the "within 24 hours" look up.

Here are the existing chat commands:

Announcing availability:
/away Sets user as away. Typing this command again sets user as "here".
/here Sets user as here. This reverses the "away" and "busy" states.
/busy Sets user as busy. Typing this command again sets user as "here".

Managing messages:
/back <number> Shows the last <number> of entries of the rooms chat.
/backtime <minutes> Shows the last <minutes> of the rooms chat.
/clear Clears the chat screen. This only affects your screen, not the screen of other users.
/me <action> Issues an IRC-like "action" to the chat.
/msg <user> <message> Initiates a PM with <user> and fills PM box with optional <message>.
/query <user> Initiates a PM with <user>

Accessing rooms:
/join <room> Switches the user to <room>. For example: "/join The Lounge"
/part Logout of the chat.
/quit Logout of the chat.
/logout Logout of the chat.

Managing users:
/ignore <user> Ignores PMs from <user>.
/invite <user> Invites <user> to the room that you are currently in.
/names Shows a list of all user names in all public rooms
/showignores Shows a list of users ignored by you and which other users are ignoring you.
/sos <message> Alerts moderator in current room or all moderators. <message> is optional.
/unignore <user> <message> Removes your ignore of <user> with optional <message> to user.
/who <user> Profile page popup for <user>. If you are <user> login information is added.
/whois <user> Profile page popup for <user> where <user> must be logged in to the chat.
/whowas <user> Profile page popup for any registered <user>.

Other:
/motd Displays the Message of the Day.
/topic Shows the topic or welcome message for the room you are in, if any.


If we continue to use this software I will make some modifications to it to try and expand this list.

This should finally be fixed.

This is a test to see if my ass can post.

Good job on that. You must have a very dexterous ass.

I will be performing some small site maintenance tomorrow. The site will go down for a few minutes Thursday morning.

The site maintenance is complete.

Um... we appear to be chat-less. Design or bug?

Thanks for pointing that out. It is there now.

Thanks!

I'll be performing a little maintenance next weekend. The site will be down for a couple minutes.

Thanks for the heads-up, sir.

I am making my backup of the site now. I'll be taking things down soon and hopefully we'll be up and running again after 5-10 minutes.

All clear, sir!

Everything looks like it is good to go. This was just a bug fix so don't go looking for new features. Let me know if you find anything that doesn't work like before.

I will be performing some site modifications and maintenance next month and want to give everyone notice about what will change.

• A gallery option will be integrated into the forum. I will be integrating the current Aberrant & Trinity galleries into the forum. I'll also be adding a personal gallery in the Open Discussion forum for anything that you'd like to share. Other galleries may be added based on user input.
• Registration will be changed so that the board rules will be displayed when first clicking on the register user link. The user must agree to the rules before being able to get to the next screen where they fill out their actual user information. This will help so people don't miss the rules checkbox.
• A button on the Quick Reply screen will be added to switch over to the Full Reply screen, preserving anything you've typed for your post up to that point.
• When a user removes themselves from a private topic a note will be added to the topic to let other participants know.
• Teaser Forums will be added. This will allow me to designate a forum as a teaser forum. These forums will be displayed on the main forum listing page even if the user doesn't have read permissions. If they try to access the forum they will get a message stating that they don't have access.
• When Guest posting is enabled on a forum, guests will now have the option to choose a username to post under, instead of just 'Anonymous'. This will go through the normal checks and not allow them to use names reserved, in use, too short, too long, etc. This will affect a couple of the 2017 specials subforums. With the knowledge that I can easily tell who posted the comment, should this option be allowed in other IC forums?
• A new user option will be added to show the user information on top of the post instead of on the left side.
• The online/offline indicator will just show the actual mood image, with alt/title text showing online/offline. Moved this up next to the username. This makes it so when the user info is on the side it doesn't take up so much vertical space.
• The Who's Online screen will show the actual forum and topic a user is looking at.
• When a user views their list of private messages, it will show all participants in each private message.
• N! Prime will be added to the subject of emails that are sent out for notifications and watched topics.
• E-mail Notifications of new private messages will send the post body as well.
• A graph will be added to the top of the list of private messages to show how many PMs a user has compared to their private message limit.
• The screen to show all user's posts will be replaced with a new version. This new version doesn't use the search engine code at all and also has an option to give a view showing all topics the user has started.
• A new spoiler markup tag will be added.
• Changed the active topics layout of the posts to display the body of the post. This will fix some problems with the popups under some browsers.
• Active Topics will be modified to display active topics & posts.
• Modified the Latest Topic/Post Islands to include the poster and time of each post.
• The ability to add a description to files that are being attached to a post will be added.
• An ajax routine will be added to allow the icon next to a forum to be double-clicked to mark an individual forum as read.

As usual, the site will go down for a brief period of time during the modifications. I will let everyone know the exact date as soon as I can.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have about the changes.

So if I'm reading this right and guest posting is enabled in a fiction forum then we could post as "Jonny NPC" during a fiction to help differentiate scenes and characters? Or perhaps even post as a mysterious persona instead of having 'Player XX' attached?

If so that would be cool, there have been a few times in fictions I've wanted to just label the post as "XXNPC" since the scene revolves around them and not other characters but there was no point in creating an entire user name just for that.

Or am I pretty much in left field somewhere...

Yeah, your example is exactly how it would work. You will have to fill in a capcha form to make sure it isn't spam, and then you can add the post with the desired character name. This allows you to add stuff for NPCs that don't merit an actual login. As I said earlier, I can still see actually posts under the guest name, but no one else could.

Let me add 2 quick rules if we add this to the fictions of IC forums. Canon character names can not be used without approval.

Any NPC that you create will be the property of the IP that created it, just like a . While the name is technically open for anyone to use, NPCs would be considered protected by the FAQ.