The Patch | New UG Cards

[Moonface]

Happy New Year!
The long-awaited sequel to 2022 is here, and as a token of my thanks and well wishes to everyone going into the New Year I have given everyone 2023 XP.

[Moonface]

Admin Junkies Interview
@aerodynamik reached out to me recently to answer a few questions as an admin of our community in what is actually my first interview of any type about UG.

Anyone curious to read it can check it out here: https://admin-junkies.com/threads/commun...ming.1005/

[aerodynamik]

Was very fun to read the answers! Thanks a bunch Moonface!

[Mr EliteL]

Wow, an interview, never realised that could be a thing. I'd just shy away from that if someone came asking for me, generally speaking that is, forum-based I'd doubt no one will because I don't have such a presence due to not having branched out to other forums. A good read still though, great answers and a bit strange they left text for emotes like "Tongue" in there.

[Moonface]

Wow, an interview, never realised that could be a thing. I'd just shy away from that if someone came asking for me, generally speaking that is, forum-based I'd doubt no one will because I don't have such a presence due to not having branched out to other forums. A good read still though, great answers and a bit strange they left text for emotes like "Tongue" in there.

They tend to be done on promotion forums as a way to give some extra promotion to a board while also giving an insight into the admin of that board.
As for some answers having emote text, that's because the text was copied directly from the PM I sent to @aerodynamik and it would grab the names of the emotes, which isn't the same as the text trigger for an emote thus you end up with text being displayed rather than the emote. You could test it by just copying the text of a post that has an emote in it, and then pasting it into the Quick Reply box. If you do it on the Full Reply screen, use either CTRL + ALT + V or set the text editor to Source Mode (last icon on the row above the text box) otherwise it instead chooses to write the emote as "null" due to trying to paste the copied text exactly as it's formatted in its original source, including embedded images such as emotes, and because images can't be directly pasted into a post the text editor doesn't know what to do with it, hence calling it "null".

[aerodynamik]

Oh that is a good spot, I will be editing that out now. The interview was quite long so I didn't check twice. My fault for being lazy!

[Moonface]

Access Issues
If you have experienced issues with the board failing to load as of an hour ago, this is because for whatever reason our server CPU was pushed over its maximum capacity. I'm hoping this is just a temporary thing that will fix itself quickly but since a lot of this has to do with the host I kind of have to wait and see if and when the usage numbers drop back to normal levels. I just wanted to put this here since I know @Karo contacted me a week prior about access issues but that was due to our host performing server maintenance, which is not the case here to my knowledge.

[Moonface]

Unexpected Downtime
If you were having issues accessing the forum yesterday in the early morning or late last night, this was due to an issue on our hosts end that should be resolved now.

[Moonface]

Board Software Updated
The forum software has been updated. This update was to address various security issues, and shouldn't have changed the way the board itself functions from a user perspective.

As always, if anyone encounters anything behaving abnormally as a potential result of this update, please let me know so I can look into it.

[Moonface]

Catching Up...
As some of you may have noticed already by receiving a PM notifying you of XP and/or card rewards for multiple things ranging back into last year, I've been catching up on giving out rewards for various contests and events that I hadn't kept up on due to a mixture of school and my ADHD causing me to forget to do it. I believe I have gone through the majority of things that were backed up, but if anyone is aware of an XP and/or UG Card reward from something that wasn't received then let me know so I can check up on it and get it fixed.

[Moonface]

Emoji Support Enabled
I have converted the forum from utf8 encoding to utf8mb4 encoding. This allows the use of emoji's in posts without causing an SQL error, including allowing direct result shares for Reactle/Squirdle/etc. instead of having to swap out the emoji's for text as had been the case until now.

As far as I'm aware this should not have caused any errors on the forum, but if you find something is acting differently than it used to and not in a good way then let me know so I can try and figure out a solution. I think we're good though.

[Moonface]

Plugins Temporarily Disabled
Due to support ending for php 7.4, our host will be moving us to php 8.2 tomorrow. To prepare for this, I will be disabling the plugins on the board as they are not all currently compatible with php 8, and my testing earlier today caused the forum to fail loading any pages if the plugins were still enabled while running the new php version.

I don't know yet what plugins do and do not work, nor how much time it will take for the ones that do not work to get fixed up. It'll be a matter of working things out as things go really.

[Moonface]

Plugins Temporarily Disabled
Due to support ending for php 7.4, our host will be moving us to php 8.2 tomorrow. To prepare for this, I will be disabling the plugins on the board as they are not all currently compatible with php 8, and my testing earlier today caused the forum to fail loading any pages if the plugins were still enabled while running the new php version.

I don't know yet what plugins do and do not work, nor how much time it will take for the ones that do not work to get fixed up. It'll be a matter of working things out as things go really.

As an update to this, I was not aware our host won't charge extra to stay on PHP 7.4 until the middle of September, so for now the upgrade won't happen until I've hopefully managed to get at least the most important plugins updated. You've probably already noticed that most of the plugins are still working on the forum, except for Alerts. For some reason that plugin is stopping the forum from loading if I enable it, so I'm currently trying to resolve the problem with it, whatever that is because the stupid thing was fine before I temporarily turned it off.

[aerodynamik]

Damn that sucks. Hopefully you'll be able to convert easily. That's the downside of MyBB sadly, many plugins are left untouched and are unmaintained for future PHP releases.

[Moonface]

Universal Gaming Cards Page Updated
After not updating it in so long I didn't even notice the plugin had become outdated which initially prevented me from updating it, the Universal Gaming Cards webpage has finally been updated to reflect everybody's current card collections as well as links to all relevant game discussion threads: https://universalgaming.net/misc.php?page=cards