Chaos

Hey all, In Brandon's most recent newsletter he sent out a link where anyone can download the prose White Sand. Therefore I am removing the password on the White Sand board, as most anyone can access it now. I'm uncertain whether I'm allowed to post a link to that White Sand manuscript; we'll investigate and post it if we can. Let me know if you have ideas on how to operate the the graphic novel/prose divisions. I'm not sure how well I like this implementation honestly.

In my opinion, there's no such thing as too little too late. It may be less timely, but that doesn't mean it is still valuable.

Update on this stuff: I will be sending PMs to many individuals about civil discourse and a lot that went wrong from page 35 to now. I must go through the painstaking effort of explaining to people, by picking apart their words, why they were not acting with respect to others, and/or flaming. This may take me through the weekend; I am way too busy for this crap. As a note: DON'T BRING UP NAZIS. Why would you do that? Ugh. Really?

Are we talking about politics here--a thing I explicitly don't want here--and are people being disrespectful? Please PM me with details, there will be repercussions. I am disappointed. EDIT: I would like to state for the record that this board is still under 17S purview and usual rules of respect are a given. It seems this has not been the case. I will be investigating this matter as I would any other on 17S and pursue our usual avenues. Please feel free to PM me always or use the report feature to get noticed by site mods/admins instantly.

@A Budgie, @Jedal So if you registered since June 2016 up until Sunday, status updates are not automatically turned on and you have to turn them on. If you go to your Profile and hit Edit Profile, by the Basic Information, there is a check box to enable status updates. I did not realize this was not auto-enabled and now with the latest update it is auto-enabled, but it isn't retroactive. Sorry about that.

Calamity has been out long after our usual 6-9 month spoiler board period. Unless there are any objections, I'm merging this board back into the general Reckoners board Sunday.

Hey guys, We have had this board for a long time and I delayed removing this due to the existence of Arcanum Unbounded. But now even Arcanum Unbounded has been out for a long time, so I think it is time to retire this board. I intend to remove this Sunday. But if you have any objections, sound off here and we could work something out.

For all info on new stuff, see my news topic:

Hey Zennix. I hoping with the new version the bug you encountered was fixed. Can you check if you can change this now?

Kill me now. Agfjskfrucbosbrhxgwh

You guys make it seem like Hemalurgy is a bad thing. You get magical powers! How awesome. Sure there's a price, but hey, that guy had it coming. Hemalurgy is the solution to all problems. A person cuts you off in driving? Well he will never make that mistake again when you cut into him with a Hemalurgic spike. Problem solved. Police coming after you because of your spiking rampages? Good thing you have magical abilities to stop them. Unlimited power, for the low, low cost of some metal of the correct alloys! Try Hemalurgy today! (17th Shard is not responsible for your actions. We just give you the spikes. What you do with them is your business. We respect privacy! Also, we legally don't want to know what you do with them.)

Hey everyone! Yesterday I did some various updates. Let's talk about what happened, what's new, and what's coming up later this year. The first thing which I did was update some server architecture, which means things should perform better. Then, I also upped server resources so that our server so that it is now a beast. We had some bizarre crashes the past few months and this should fix it. In addition to that, I upped our software version for 17S. That update fixed a lot of bugs and should increase performance, too. But it also came out with some features! Activity Stream Menu In the original big update last summer, Activity Streams were a thing, but they didn't perform particularly well. Additionally, since I heavily modded the main navigation bar, I didn't know how to replicate the menu that the default skin used to generate Activity Streams. That meant I essentially gimped some functionality for a while, and made this more like "View Unread Content" on the prior version. In this version, though, Activity Streams perform much better than before, and I got the menu properly replicated, so here they are, at long last. So what are Activity Streams? It's a way to view activity on the site in a totally customizable way. Maybe you want to view Unread Content, but you only want to view things in the topics you follow. Or, maybe you want to view new content but you just want to see stuff in various Book Discussion boards--perhaps you don't care about the RP content, or, alternatively, maybe you really care about RP content and only want to see that. Activity Streams allow you to make custom feeds of basically whatever you want. You can look at all content of a type (topics or gallery images, etc.), sort by particular forum, sort content by individual member, and you can sort what date range you want for every stream. How do you access Streams? On desktop, click the newspaper icon next to the Search bar to see the Streams menu. (On mobile, the stream menu is in the sidebar.) There are a number of default streams: All Unread Content Content I Started Content I Follow Content I Posted In (I can create more default streams, if you find something useful. For example, I could make a "Members I Follow" stream, but I decided to cut that for now to make the menu smaller. Let me know what you'd like to see. Notably, I cannot create a stream that narrows Topics by a particular forum, but you can create a custom stream for that.) After the default streams, you will have all of your own streams, and by clicking the Create New Stream you have an abundance of options for things you'd like to do. Most options are self-explanatory. One thing I expect you'd like to do is to sort things by forum, so you only see something from a certain list of forums. To do this, select Content Type, and hit Topics, and you'll see a gear next to it. If you click that gear, you can click which forums you want to see in that stream. By going into each stream, you can rename it, make it your default stream, or delete it. Setting something as your default stream is primarily useful on mobile, when the newspaper icon takes you automatically to your default stream, rather than opening a menu. I'm really excited for you to have this customizability at last. Play around with it and let me know if you want any additional default streams. Leaderboard In this update, we restore a functionality we had in the old version of the site prior to 2016: a way to see who has the most reputation. But it's actually way more than that. There are now Reputation Leaderboards. (You can access this from the menu to the right of the Search bar, or the usual menu on mobile.) Every day, if you get top reputation, you'll get a trophy saying you "won" that day. This trophy is present on your profile, too!. On the Leaderboard page, there are three tabs, one for the current Leaderboard (and you can set who "won" in whatever date range you want), one for past daily winners, and one for Top Members. You can sort Top Members by not just Reputation, but by Post Count and more. It's awesome! Unfortunately, on Top Members, I can only display the top 100, but it's certainly much better than not having any way to see this. Maybe I'll figure out how to put these trophies on posts, but in the meantime, it's not only useful but a fun little game to see who got upvoted the most in a day. Other minor notable things There's a lot of minor fixes: Moving multiple PMs to different folders Can clear old data in the text editor Display name history is now on profiles (as it should be) The log out bug from multiple devices is (apparently) fixed Many bug fixes There were also some other things I did: I moved the Birthdays sidebar widget to the bottom. There is also now a widget for users online in the past 12 hours. I can set this to be whatever time frame you'd like. I did this because we had this on the old version of the site and thought you'd maybe like it back, but I worry it's too long. What do you guys think? Certain abilities that new accounts would need to manually enable are now automatically enabled for brand-new accounts. These include the ability to View Signatures, Enabling Status Updates, and having a Recent Profile Visitors block on your profile. Apparently these weren't enabled by default when you register, which is insane to me. Thankfully, that's resolved. What's next I have some other big goals for 17S. I'll be moving the Coppermind to its own device to further enhance server stability. That way if 17S is acting up, the Coppermind won't go down. This is not a significant extra expenditure, so don't worry. Though, speaking of expenses: ads are eventually coming, since we've spent a lot on hosting and software with nothing in return. We want to make ads very clean with nothing annoying. The first phase of this will be to include some Amazon affiliate links in natural places. I want to make it obvious when these are implemented, but hopefully you guys won't mind? My goal, always, is to make a clean interface for you all, so I think this will be a reasonable start... I also want to get HTTPS support on the whole site. There are some specifics on implementation that I need to sort out, though, so this will happen this summer, most likely. There will be a big feature update from our software, IPS, in moving from version 4.1 to 4.2. In 4.2, there are some very cool features that are pretty neat, and we'll be opening up some discussion talking about these features and we'd like your input. We might be changing some long time features, like the reputation system, so we'd love to hear your thoughts, when the time gets closer. Lastly, there are some minor things on my agenda that just haven't been a top priority in my limited time I have to spend this semester. (Being permanently overtime in my teaching assignment this semester is really fun! Not.) But these will happen: forum game subforum, Back to Top button, and more emoticons. Phew, I think that's it. What do you think of the new stuff?

Oops! I did indeed miss that. I've fixed that and I'm fixing a few minor things now.

I prefer the traditional, "Happy Zombie Jesus Day". You found them! Yay, you get some cookies. There were a few things I didn't notice in my testing, like the mobile menu and some issues with Tags, which I'm working to resolve.

That's true! But I actually did that earlier today. (And the birthday widget was in the sidebar before.) The members online in the last few hours is newish though. But there are two other things!

Can you find the new features I added to the site before I write a post tomorrow morning? I will give you cookies if you can find both of them!

Okay, I have now done the site software updates and I think everything is working correctly. I'll write a post talking about the two main features that have been added tomorrow, but for now, see if you can find them! (They aren't especially hard to find.)

The core of the server updates--the part that I was thinking would take forever--ended up being really fast. Linode is great, they said "we estimate this upgrade to take 96 minutes." Actual time? Eleven minutes. Okay, sweet. I need to do some final preparations but I will do 17S software updates in a little bit or tomorrow morning. I'm a bit worried I didn't test skin changes in this new version quite well enough, so I'll think on it. But that should be less than ten minutes of downtime.

Hey guys, Tonight at 10pm MDT time (9pm Pacific, midnight Eastern), I'm going to be doing some server updates and stuff. This will affect 17th Shard and the Coppermind. It will take maybe two to three hours, but it could be shorter. I'll keep you apprised on Twitter!

It only took me way too long but I finally reverse engineered a menu that I've always wanted the forums to have. I only stayed up way past my bedtime to figure it out. You'll see it soon, as well as a few more site updates very very soon.

I don't know how their subscriptions work, but on the Writing Excuses site you can download every episode directly. For example: http://www.writingexcuses.com/category/season/season-01/

Kalidin, There's no reason for you to post that many times in a row. We have a no double post rule, and you're being excessively spammy. You made your point.

I want to do a revision of that in the Cosmere article. I have written a draft that cuts a lot of the detail out but I need time to cite it and revise it. So it's going to be a thing I'm going to do. There's a number of things I desperately need to do on that article... I started that article with a philosophy that more was better, but I have thought it is too much recently. So I'd say I'll take care of it soon(tm), I have a plan.

It is my impression that this will work: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:102123174/sounds.rss That old link was when we hosted podcasts on our own site, and wasn't a proper podcast RSS feed, but rather an RSS feed for that specific set of news articles. RSS feeds for podcast apps need to be pretty particular to work. Let me know if that link doesn't work By the way, though it is very strange that in the Soundcloud app you can't save tracks offline (what the crap), I have set things so that you can download the tracks directly. I guess it only works on desktop, which is totally unnecessary and dumb.