Flagship - The Independent Magazine for Gamers

Rather than post all website news and assorted website items in the announcements, thereby hogging up space on the front page of the site, I have decided to create this forum thread here in this out of the way space.

Anyway, here are some recent updates (in no specific order) done to the Flagship website here in the late and wee early morning hours where I live.

1. Put up a new header image banner.

2. Created and added to the site a Flagship favicon.ico image for the web browser bar.

3. Move the welcome bar to the top of the header section, and placed the header banner image just below it.

4. Re-did the toplinks section of links, adding some new links to the Polls, Back Issues, and Site Statistics sections, as well as replacing the toplinks icon graphics with some small life preserver icon graphics. The idea was that a ship would have lots of life preservers on it, and it was a play on the "Flagship" name.

5. Consolidated the Founding Editors block on the front page of the site, by merging it into the Editorial Team box.

6. Deleted some spaces in the header section, to bring things closer together in that area, thereby causing the other pages that include the header section in them to display more towards the top of the page. This is why the welcome box and the header banner image now touch, whereas there used to be a space in between them.

7. I have removed the Forum Statistics box from the right hand side of the site' front page.

thumbs Up to Grim....

I have removed the Private Messages box and the Search box from the front page.

I have increased the size of the text in the Welcome box at the top of the front page.

I have appointed smurphboogie as a moderator for the Flagship Reviews forum. He will be assisting us, by helping us to post reviews from the old Flagship website into that forum.

In the Latest Threads box on the front page of the site, now, instead of clicking on a link and it taking you to the first page of that discussion thread, it will now take you to the most recent posting in that discussion thread.

On multi-page discussion threads, I think that site users will find this to be an improvement, as it eliminates an annoyances, as far as I am concerned.

One site visitor who registered has complained about receiving no activation e-mail, so that they can get their account activated. I have not received a similar complaint before, but to try and avoid similar problems for others who register, I have changed the default from e-mail verification to instant activation.

I don't have a reason to believe that this will create a problem with spam, but if it does, then I will revert the verification process back to e-mail verification. I, myself, prefer instant account activation, whenever I register on a new website's forums. Anyway, we will try it, and see how it works out.

If you ever encounter a problem pertaining to the site, whether registering or otherwise, be sure to report it. If you don't report it, then no one on this end may otherwise learn about it. If we don't know about it, then we cannot take steps to track it down and to fix it. Your cooperation and assistance in this matter is appreciated.

You probably won't get spam postings, but you will get spam users - ie they register, and put their home site pointing to (www. some place you don't want) or some such. These reverse links raise their profile or something.

Worth looking at your user names every few months and banning the most obvious ones (they tend to be pretty obvious).

OTOH you may be lucky....

I recently corrected a typo in the links at the top of the page. It previously said "LINKS," but has since been changed to read "POLLS." I'm not sure how I managed to botch that one initially, but I did catch it and made the correction, accordingly.

I don't often check the calendar section of the site, but I happened to, today, and noticed that there were a number of spam postings by guest accounts. I checked the posting permissions in the admin control panel, and sure enough, an oversight on my part had allowed some spam to get posted using the calendar function.

The ever-handy Tom Fyfe cleaned up the spam, and I modified the posting permissions for guest accounts to close this loophole which the spammers had exploited.