Subject: Behold, a (proposed) new Board arises

Author: Tomash and Techno-Dann

Email: [Dann’s]

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working on a new Board to because there are problems with the current one, such as:

• A lack of proper accounts
• No post editing
• No real moderation
• A limited number of IP bans
• No protection against XSS (people can stick in any HTML, including nasty tags like <script>)
• A tendency to throw 500 errors at people

To solve these problems and resolve certain controversies, such as the subforum debate, with compromise solutions, we (mostly Tomash) have created a new Board system with the following new or changed features (and some others):

• Accounts, which are required for posting
• Post editing (only your posts, though)
• A history of edits, so everyone can see what you changed.
• Protection against nymshifting. If you change the “Author” field to anything other than your username, the author field will display as “[what you entered] (posted by [your username])”. If you change your username, the “(posted by)” notices will update automatically
• Post tagging
• Several different ways of organizing the posts

• Sorting by date (the way the current Board works and the default)
• Sorting by tags, where the threads are first grouped by the tags of the posts in them then sorted by date. A thread can be in more than one group. That’s a feature, not a bug. Threads go off topic.
• Subforum view, where each tag is presented as its own subforum where only the subjects of the first posts in each thread are displayed.

• An HTML sanitizer that strips unrecognized/dangerous tags from posts and automatically closes unclosed tags
• Support for writing posts in Markdown, so we don’t have to deal with HTML
• Moderators, granted their powers (on the technical side) by manual edits to the database. (A procedure for appointing moderators should be created) These moderators can:

• Edit any post.
• (Un)lock a (sub)thread, which prevents any replies from being added to the therad
• (Un)poof a (sub)thread. Poofing a thread causes a notification to pop up whenever someone tries to view a post it the thread, warning them that the community strongly objects to the contents of the thread and giving them the option to go back to the page they were on previously.
• Change a post’s “Sort timestamp”. Changing the sort timestamp makes the post act (for sorting purposes) as if it had been posted at the time in the sort timestamp, not when it had actually been posted. This can be used to make a post stick around on the front page longer or to make it fall off faster.
• These features can be used for “soft” deletion. People won’t see a locked, poofed thread that lurks near the posts from 2007 unless they really want to.
• (Un)ban any user, IP, or email.

• All moderator actions are public record.

• If a moderator edits, locks, poofs, or resorts a post, their user account becomes the posts’s new author, so we know who changed things. The original author (should the moderator dishonestly change the author field) will still be listed as the author of the publicly-accessible previous version.
• A list of bans is accessible to anyone with an account.

• Improved search
• Improved post preview (it’s on the same page as the edit form now)
• Improved email reply notification. The email actually includes the text of the post, and there is a button that lets you stop watching a thread
• A modern redesign that uses Twitter Bootstrap 2.0.
• An archive script that will allow us to move the contents of the old Boards to new Board(s) if we decide to switch.
• And a few other things …

A preview Board is located at https://new-ppc-board.mooo.com/. YOU WILL SEE A SECURITY WARNING WHEN GOING TO THAT ADDRESS! THIS IS EXPECTED. We’re using a “self-signed” SSL certificate, which means that nobody else has verified that we are who we claim to be. This will be fixed if we make the new Board our permanent home. For now, please add an exemption if and only if he only thing the browser complains about is that the certificate is self-signed.

Please, experiment with the new Board, try to break it, and give your feedback and concrit either here or on the new Board. Also, feel free to ask any questions you might have. Dann will be handing temporary moderator status to people who request it who would be likely candidates for such status in the event of a move.

We’d like to thank all the people in the IRC who banged on the alpha versions and provided constructive criticism and encouragement, especially JulyFlame, who gave a much-needed critique of the early design of the site.

— Tomash and Dann