So normally when I start a new community, I make a statement about rules that normally goes something like, "We don't need to make a list of boilerplate rules here, right? You know how to govern yourselves. Rather than make a list of rules, we'll wait for situations to arise. When and if they do, then we'll add rules. And hopefully, they'll be weirdly specific rules that'll make reading the rule list kinda fun and beg the story of why we have them." Basically, I don't think I need to state the obvious. I'm among civilized people, am I not?
But times have changed a bit since I first started moderating communities with this loose style of administration. So I am going to institute one rule right off.
1. No AI: As artists, Ray and I are opposed to the use of AI for creative work. As community managers, we believe entertaining AI slop both is and yet further encourages low effort posting, which we don't want. Also, it's almost always ugly. I spent all this time stylizing this place for you; don't make my forums ugly. No AI images and don't use AI to reply on here either. Like, come on. You don't need AI to compose a forum post, seriously.
Any other rules will be added as needed, but generally we try to deal with situations on here as if they are one-off occurrences.
Beyond the rules, this post is also for announcing and documenting changes and new user features on the forum. Anytime I make changes or additions to the forum's functionality or rules, it will be announced here.
Deleted obsolete profile fields (ICQ and Skype, lol) and added one for pronouns. If you want something besides what's there, send me a message and I will add it to the dropdown.
Installed mods:
Quick Spoiler (https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=2940): Spoiler tags.
Ultimate Menu (https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=3674): so there's a link back to the main site on the menu.
Embed Instagram BBCode (https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=4059): lets you embed Instagram posts.
Bluesky Auto Embed (https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=4424): Automatically detects and embeds Bluesky posts.
Began stylizing the ZephyrLight theme.
Installed mods:
Email Obfuscator (https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=4220): further obfuscates email addresses beyond SMF's native measures to prevent them from being scraped by spambots.
StopForumSpam (https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=4311): checks new registrations against a database of spambots.
Added stylized Emoji "smiley" set, Thomas the Tank Emoji. Hand gestures may need further editing because I lost the plot on the various shades of gray i was using.
Replaced a bunch of the older style iconography with more modern flat icons.
Ray has begun making art for our stamp achievement system, so I made a small adjustment to the code so that the stamps under our posts link to their page on the stamp list. That way, users can easily access the full-size art of the stamps and see what one has to do to earn them.