9/19/2017 7:35:28 AM
Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Arr! What do we have here? It looks like September 19th is
Talk Like a Pirate Day! Our emotes already be sailin' the seven seas lookin' for treasure. It's time to get your sea legs and show us your pirate skills!
If ye be lucky, we won't make ye
walk the plank.
9/16/2017 5:19:09 PM
New Moderators and Media &Events members
We are very happy to announce the addition of four new Moderators,
Bbykat51, Devin2600, PuzzlerBird and
yankees24cano!
We also have two new members joining the Media & Events Special Project Team,
leah2life and
beanie11198!
Please use
this thread to welcome and congratulate all of them.
8/30/2017 10:49:59 PM
Features Update 1.15.0 and Operational Updates
Hello everyone!
Please see below for details of some Operational and Development updates. The Development updates will be going live at around midnight tonight.
Operational Updates• The words "Damn" and "Hell" have been removed from filter and can now be used on the site. This means that notifications won't be issued in cases such as town names being "Hell". However, Modmins will still issue notifications if the context in which these words are used are designed to cause offense or upset.
• Dream Codes were previously treated as Friend Codes because they were both 12 digit numerical codes. The system that prevents Friend Codes from being posted also prevented Dream Codes from being posted. However, now that Dream Codes are alpha-numeric, and therefore different from Friend Codes, we are allowing Dream Codes to be posted anywhere on ACC.
• As part of upcoming Policy changes, there will be some Site Rule updates soon. When these are deployed, you will be asked to accept new Terms of Service when you log onto ACC. These updates will happen separately to the features deployment today. More information will be posted after the Site Rules update.
• After the Site Rule updates, a thread for each Site Rule will be shown on the
Site Features Queue board. There, Members may make suggestions and Modmins dedicated to those threads will monitor them.
Development Updates•
Avatars - Housekeeping: The villager Alli in City Folk and Maelle in Wild World were not available in the avatars section even though we had images of them. So, both were made available. Also for City Folk, Jeremiah was duplicated. So, one was removed. Additionally, all Wild World monkeys weren't in the avatar section. These have been created and added.
•
Boards - Tidying Appearance: With Dream Codes now appearing below avatars, and that section having to be widened, other visual aspects of boards and posts have been tidied and tweaked.
•
Emotes - Special Event: Emotes were added for a particular event in September.
•
Fix - Left Sidebar: Adding a board with a long name to the
My Favorite Boards section of the left sidebar, used to skew the appearance of the list. This has been corrected.
•
Fix - Word Missing in Hover Message: On the Site Features Queue board, the icons to the left of the thread titles show messages when hovering over the icons. One of the messages was missing a word. This has been fixed.
•
Graphics - Clock: Since various graphics and images have been spruced up, the clock showing the time has also been tidied up.
•
Graphics - Home Page: The appearance of the Home Page has improved. The AC games are in a coloured box and therefore more defined, plus sharp lines were rounded off.
•
Graphics - Spring & Summer: The ACC Spring and Summer backgrounds were the same. This meant that the green grass background was displayed for six months of the year. It was decided to have a separate Spring and Summer background and two brand new ones were created. You will see the new Summer background today.
•
Graphics - Winter & Fall: While updating the Spring and Summer backgrounds, the Fall and Winter ones were done too. You will see the new Fall background tomorrow. Alongside the background change, the borders were changed too.
•
Graphics - Updated ACC Logo: Since we've got new seasonal themes and other refreshed graphics, the ACC Logo was also updated.
•
Home Page - Updated Animal Crossing Information: Information was added to the Home Page for Happy Home Designer, amiibo Festival, Welcome amiibo, and amiibo Cards. Also, links to various boards and guides were added.
•
Graphics - Updated New Leaf Boxart: The art image for the New Leaf game box was the pre-release image, and was on the Home Page and on the New Leaf guides page. It has now been updated.
•
Icons - Site Features Queue: The
Site Features Queue board is a place where we list all features that Staff are discussing, working on, have implemented or rejected. Each thread is at a different stage of completion, and this is shown by different coloured light bulb icons next to each thread. Only certain threads, with particular coloured light bulb icons, can be posted on by Members if they want to contribute to the feature. However, for colour-blind Members, it's not easy to distinguish which threads can be posted on as all threads have the same shape of icon next to them. We've now changed the shapes and types of icons so that it's easier for everyone to see which discussions they can be involved in.
•
Log In - Help Link: Occasionally, some Members have trouble logging in. The "Forgot Password" link isn't always helpful as the password isn't sometimes sent. So, a new link has been added for Members to be able to email Modmins. The response won't be as immediate as the "Forgot Password" system, but a Modmin will at least be able to produce a Temporary Password and email it to the Member.
•
My Towns - Animal Residents: When viewing another Member's page for My Towns, clicking on
View Residents led to a page showing GameCube versions of the villagers. Since the avatar section of ACC contains the correct images for villagers in all of the AC games, the View Residents link will now show the avatar images.
•
My Towns - Navigation: The My Towns page can be quite confusing. It's probably better to redesign this page for ACC 2.0, but for now a few things were added to make the page more user-friendly.
•
My Towns - Dream Codes: Dream Codes can now be posted freely around the site, but if you don't wish to keep reposting your code you can enter it into the My Towns section of ACC. This can be accessed via the left sidebar in the section called
My ACC. If you choose to then show a character from that town as a default character in the
My Characters section, your Dream Code will then always appear in all of your posts in the section below your avatar.
•
New Members - Warning of Username Character Limit: When signing up, New Members sometimes use long usernames and believe they have successfully signed up to ACC. However, any username longer than 15 characters gets truncated, resulting in some unhappy Members. We've now installed a warning message on the sign-up page to inform people of the 15 character limit.
•
Posts - New Layout: In order to fit Dream Codes below avatars in posts, the area needed to be resized and the appearance slightly altered.
•
Staff - Dev Page: The
Developer Page needed more specific and up-to-date information to attract more volunteer Developers to help us with ACC 2.0.
•
Staff - Devs 1: A feature was added for the Devs.
•
Staff - Devs 2: A second feature was added for the Devs.
•
Staff - Devs 3: A third feature was added for the Devs.
•
Staff - Modmin: A feature was added for the Modmins.
•
Staff - Modmin Views: When a Member submits a ticket for a problem on ACC with another Member, Modmins can see the history of notifications for the Member that is being reported. When Modmins initiate a ticket themselves, the view is missing. This feature will ensure Modmins can see a Member's notification history irrespective of how the ticket was generated.
•
Staff - Support Emails: When a Modmin assigns an email to themselves, no other Modmin can attend to the email. This has caused issues before, and therefore this feature will allow those emails to be released. Any released emails can be picked up by other Modmins.
•
Threads - Site Features Queue: The Site Features Queue many pages and it is hard to view or search for certain threads. As with other boards, the column titles can be used to sort the threads into a particular order. However, with the SFQ board, the threads also have a status to show Members the stage of discussion or development for features. Since the status of threads on this board is pivotal for its use, Members will now also be able to sort threads according to status.
•
Threads - Skip to First or Last Page: Some Members use ACC frequently on a mobile device. The feature to have an option to skip to the first or last page of a thread will make it easier than to use the drop down page selection on a mobile device.
Operational & Development Updates•
Boards - ACC 2.0: A new board was required for Devs to communicate with all Staff about the progress of ACC 2.0 and to get the input of the Staff. This is for the initial stages, and the Community will be involved later via the SFQ board and other ways.
•
Boards - Staff Work Updates: The Staff use a board called the Features Dashboard (FD) to have discussions about features. Each thread on the FD is meant to have an equivalent thread on the
Site Features Queue board (SFQ) to allow Members to participate in the early stages of a discussion, and to be able to keep up to date on the status of features. Unfortunately, it is extremely time-consuming to both create threads on the SFQ board and to post updates on individual threads. In this deployment, we've automated the SFQ thread updates and also created an easier method of adding threads to the SFQ board. Therefore, Members should see a lot more threads on the SFQ board in September.
•
Notifications - Bans & Points: Within notifications, bans and points were linked. To give a Member a temporary ban, the Member should have already accrued 3 points. However, Modmins have found that sometimes temporary bans are warranted without adding points to an account. Although we've been practicing this as a test run, this update will separate bans from points within the UT system. Additionally, more ban lengths have been introduced so that Modmins have extra options without having to resort to permanent bans. Further details will be announced when the Policy Page is updated and the new policy will be available to view there.
•
Posts - Modmin Edits: This feature is to change the colour of Modmin Edits in posts - from glaring red to a medium blue. Also, since there is a Site Rule disallowing the discussion of notifications, rule breaks will not show in the post when a Member receives a notification.
•
Posts - New Member Restrictions: New Member restrictions have been amended to create a good balance between allowing a genuine New Member to post freely, but be restrictive to a duplicate account intending to spam.
Please be advised that some links above will not be working until tomorrow.
If you have any queries or problems regarding this update, a Site Support thread will be available later. For your convenience, the link to it is
here.
We hope you enjoy the updates.
8/30/2017 6:28:49 AM
Apologies for the outage yesterday
So sorry for ACC being down yesterday.
The server went down after a problem at the host. Although the initial problem was fixed, the server didn't come back fully and needed to be rebooted.
We're sorry for the several hours offline and any inconvenience it may have caused you.
Since we were down for so long, we decided not to deploy Update 1.15.0 yesterday and instead will be deploying tonight at around midnight. Hopefully, tonight's down time will be only for a few minutes.
8/29/2017 4:42:06 AM
Update 1.15.0 will be going live at around midnight
Hi everyone!
This is advance warning that ACC will be down for a few minutes at around midnight tonight for a features deployment. It would be advisable not to be working on any large posts at this time, and to save anything you are working on.
This will be update 1.15.0 and it is fairly large. After this deployment, we are likely to have only one Dev working on ACC, and smaller updates. All other available and working Devs will be concentrating on trying to establish a basic ACC 2.0. More information will be given on that in September.
