Aaron Lewis

GuildPortal Dev Blog

Updates from Aaron Lewis, GuildPortal Code Monkey

Entries From Aaron Lewis' Blog

8/31 Custom Access Names

Posted 8/31/2012 2:15 PM by Aaron Lewis. 88084 reads. Share:

The following went down during this release cycle (some of the more urgent items were deployed as hotfixes):
  • Enhancement You can now customize the names of the access levels (Public, Associate, Member, Council, Officer, SuperAdmin). They appear in the forums and other places. From any guild page, click the Admin item on the Guild Bar, hover over Member Management, and then select Custom Level Names. You can also get there from Member Management in the Control Panel.
  • Enhancement The paging while reading posts has been enhanced a little.
  • Css A div has been added that wraps around quotes (previously, the quote titles and bodies were all on their own). The class name is quoteWrapper.
  • Css Widget and forum category headers now stretch their background images vertically to match the height of the container. This was done to remove the need to regenerate your images/gradients whenever you changed the font size or the padding.
  • Css The ForumCategoryHeader class had rules with !important in them, making it difficult for those who dig into CSS to customize it. The !important directives have been removed.
  • Bug When mod authors update their mods, the "details" will now save properly.
  • Bug The edit dialog for voice server status widgets has been set back to the correct one.
  • Bug For IE users, the voting poll results were sometimes not displaying. Fixed.
  • Enhancement Auto-suggest has been added to the public GuildPortal page search (along the top). It'll make it easier for people to find your guild more quickly -- it displays things like your game, server, and even more detail if they hover over / select it via arrow keys.
  • Enhancement Tooltips from GuildHead have been incorporated and will now automatically work on any GuildWars2 site.
  • Bug The new, less-intrusive widget admin "thingy" (technical term) was sometimes making IE go into convulsive fits, playing with its mind, attempting to get it to give up the location of the rebel bases. I told it that IE does not know the location of the rebel bases, so now it's all better.
  • Enhancement Member admin tools have been added to the Guild Bar.
  • Enhancement The shout box was displaying uglier than a dirty monkey at a fancy dinner party. Well, I've never been to a fancy dinner party, but I imagine a dirty monkey would look pretty ugly at one. Anyway, it's been cleaned up (pretty much to spec with what Pinstripesc suggested). Thanks!
  • Bug The ability to disable paging, and to select page size when it's enabled, has been restored to the admin member editor grid. Now if too many of you guilds with over 1000 members disable paging and refresh the grid a whole bunch, I'm going to know about it and I'm going to do something really mean. I'm not sure what  yet, but you're not going to like it one bit!
  • Maint Some enhanced debugging tools have been added, so it'll make problem resolution faster and all that.
Thanks for choosing GuildPortal! We am u!

8/28 - Trojan False Positive

Posted 8/28/2012 5:44 PM by Aaron Lewis. 77910 reads. Share:

Some of you running a couple different virus scanners are running into alerts on your guild sites. They're false positives centered around a trojan called JS:Blacole. The scanners are freaking out about something they don't like in the resource files GuildPortal passes down to support some of the richer client-side control. We use Telerik (a control vendor) for much of this.

They are aware of the problem, and so are the virus scanner developers, who are now (or already have) updating their definitions so that these false positives will go away, and take their ZOMG-factor with them.

For anyone interested, the Telerik threads talking about this are here and here, and at the Avast forums over here, but they've announced they've fixed it, so go grab the latest definitions.

8/24 Release

Posted 8/24/2012 6:49 PM by Aaron Lewis. 119158 reads. Share:

There are a couple releases rolled up in this:
  • Those who have topic update notifications sent to their mobile devices (via SMS) will now be able to click a link that will take them directly to the topic on the mobile version of their site (site.url/m).
  • Clicking on profile links now displays a context menu that provides the following options: Member Detail (displays the window that used to be the only option when clicking a profile link), Private Chat (if they're online), Visit Site (their personal site), Visit Wall, Send Mail and, if you're a roster admin of the guild, a link that will open up the member editor.
  • The voice server status widget now displays detail for both Ventrilo and Mumble servers. Previously, only Ventrilo server detail was available.
  • The Global Guild Bar can now have the foreground text of the main bar customized.
  • The Star Wars: The Old Republic server status widget was hanging when the SWTOR servers were slow to respond, so the duration the data is cached has been increased.
  • The Who's Online widget will now auto-update its list as members log in and time out.
  • Links to support videos in the Control Panel Dashboard have been fixed.
  • New CSS classes have been added for the Shouts widget for those who want to modify the appearance of it at a more detailed level. They are gp-shout, gp-shout-source, gp-shout-body and gp-shout-ally-link. They, along with full descriptions of where they appear and what they contain, are documented in the GuildPortal CSS class listing (available from many of the Custom editor sections of the Control Panel).
  • The Forums widget would stretch out beyond the boundaries of the page width style settings if any of the forums had a lot of sub-forums. This only happened in IE, but it's fixed anyhow.
  • The One-on-One Chat area that displays incoming chat was not scrolling far enough down when new items came in. This has been fixed, along with an overhaul of the One-on-One Chat UI.
  • The member editor grid in the Control Panel now offers the option to export to Excel, PDF, Word or CSV.
  • The member editor grid has also been enhanced with an easy-to-use filtering control that lets you build complex queries against your member listing. For example, you could easily build a query to return all members with an access level less than officer that haven't logged on for over a year.
  • The queries involved in reading posts in a topic have been optimized quite a bit, so your forums are a bit quicker.
  • The border color of Guild Global Bar sub-menus can now be customized.
  • The size of the content zones (left, center and right) on any guild page can now be dynamically resized by simply clicking and dragging when you are logged in with Designer rights. You don't even need to enter page edit mode.
  • When updating to the latest version of a widget-type mod, your settings for which page it appears on, the title, and the order were all wiped out. This no longer happens.

8/09 - Couple hotfixes

Posted 8/9/2012 10:02 AM by Aaron Lewis. 36208 reads. Share:

There will probably be a few unscheduled pushes today as I finish ruthlessly crushing the problem that was causing the "Service Unavailable" errors over the past couple days. I was up all last night (no pity, I was well-dosed with caffeine!) tweaking and narrowing down.

While I'm pretty sure I hit the problem -- it looked like an infinite loop in the page you see when you click on someone's name -- I'm going to continue monitoring it today and seeing what else I can do to further optimize things, to make better use of the processing power and memory of the web and database servers.

By pushing the hotfixes, I'm also moving some feature enhancements to production that weren't going to be released until Friday. Not a bit deal, and none of them is ground-breaking. One of them is a context menu that pops up when you click on a member link (like in the who's online box or the last poster column in the forum display), which provides a much easier way to view their info, start a private chat, send mail, visit their site, and so on. Little things like that.

Sorry for the service interruptions, thanks for your patience, and as always, thank you for choosing GuildPortal!

8/03 Release

Posted 8/6/2012 1:14 PM by Aaron Lewis. 21165 reads. Share:

  • Some refactoring of required Javascript files was done in order to reduce the number of files that browsers were having to download, which should decrease overall page load times.
  • Admins now have the ability to customize the appearance of the global guild bar. They also have the ability to disable it altogether, for all visitors to their site. We highly recommend you do not do this however, as many future features may only be available to those who have it enabled.
  • The window that comes up when you click a member link has been cleaned up, and an error on one of that tabs has been fixed.
  • In your Profile settings, there is now a privacy option that will prevent you from appearing on anybody's global guild bar when you are online.
  • The notification of member login window has been made less of a punk in FireFox.
  • The global guild bar now has a default faded appearance, so you can see the style of the guild site behind it, and it fades in to full view when a member hovers their mouse over it.
  • A bug affecting searching of guilds from the public-side pages has been fixed.