Website Upgrade

[Lord_Chris 270]

Hi guys,

I'm pleased to announce the site upgrade has been a success. Our forum is now running a new software which has many more features available to it. All your posts and information should be here fine, but if there are any issues please do let me know. A word of warning that anyone who visits the main site will be unable to login for the moment, this is due to an authentication issue I'm working on. But you can still access it as a guest.

I've taken this opportunity to change a lot about how the site is configured. To start with, we've done away with the 'New members' group. These were members who had made less than five posts on the site, and had a large number of restrictions placed on them, such as not being able to post links, not view profiles and not use the PM. I'm pleased to say that with the new software, we have been able to reduce the relevant restrictions down to a small number of posts made per user account instead of hindering all users as potential spammers.

• We also now have a notifications system. You can choose how you want to be notified of topics, posts, PMs...., i.e. you can choose to receive a notification on the site, or receive an email, or get both. You can do that here. There's a lot of potential notification settings, so I'd recommend taking a minute to make sure it's right for you.
• You can also "follow" other users now. To do this, head over to a user's profile and click the "follow" button. This will notify you of any new content by that user. I've already gone ahead and followed some of you to keep up with what you're doing :)
• Status updates: On your profile, you can now post status updates. A nice way of keeping in touch with your followers, who can reply to your messages etc. To enable status updates, head over to your profile, click on the "edit profile" button, and then enable them from that screen.
• Clubs. This is a nice functionality which allow you guys to have more control over what goes on in the community. Clubs are essentially social groups where you can run your own forums on there about things, in addition to the main forums we have. So you might decide to create a History club, or a club dedicated to a certain game mod or something else entirely different. I've already gone ahead and setup a one for the Stronghold 2 LOTR Mod as an example.
• Login through Steam. You can now login to the site via Steam. We'll be adding more integrations such as Facebook soon.
• Tapatalk integration. This one is aimed primarily to stop @EaglePrince from nagging ;) ;) I'm pleased to announce that the forum officially supports integration with Tapatalk now.
• Two-factor authentication. Those of you who are more "security conscious" will be pleased to know you can now authenticate your account using Google Authenticator.

Have a look around, get to know the new forum! Looking forward to hearing what you all have to say :)

[EaglePrince 234]

Wow, this is awesome! I wasn't responding to your messages about this, but I was following everting you said. I was somewhat worried that this might take more time to get done, but I'm very happy with this being done quicker.

I will try out Tapatalk as well, if it has started to work. :D

[EaglePrince 234]

Hi, I just wanted to ask how's it going with Tapatalk? I have tried to find Stronghold Nation at Tapatalk, but I didn't make it. Perhaps something additional needs to be installed in this forum. I don't want to be pushing about this, I just wanted to ask if you had a look at it? :)

[Lord_Chris 270]

I was under the impression that you could just use it. I haven't configured anything specifically for it yet. I'll take a look today and see if I can sort something out.

[Lord_Chris 270]

Fixed and verified as working. Try searching for us now and you'll be able to use it via the Tapatalk app

[EaglePrince 234]

Thank you Chris, this is awesome now.

Just to show it to everybody else, this is how it looks like in Tapatalk. As you may see, right when hoping into the forum one can see all unread messages, or all new messages in the timeline. You can also view the forum by subsections/subforums, although I think that that in particular is more convenient to do on a PC with larger screen and in more tabs. Still, this makes it much easier to talk with others without waiting to get to a computer.

There are also some ads in Tapatalk from which only Tapatalk gets money if I'm not mistaken, and getting rid of them is overpriced in my opinion. If was giving any money to anybody, I'd rather "suffer" with ads (or use an ad blocker) and donate the money directly to SHN - to keep the servers running etc.



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[Lord_Chris 270]

I'll admit, I think it's a neat app and I can see why you like it. To be honest, if there was the demand for it and we had the traffic (members, not views- we're getting them anyway) I would consider getting a guy I know to create an official SHN app for us which would cover the main site as well. I nearly worked with him on a project a year or so ago but unfortunately it fell through at the last moment.

I will be (at some point) creating a responsive mobile design for the main site though, because I can see that a little under half our traffic comes from mobile devices. But, the priority for now is getting more articles and info out there. The other thing to consider about Apps though is that they're incredibly expensive to maintain. Apple charges $100 a year just for listing your app on the App Store. So unless there was significant demand for this (I'm talking about several hundred people as a minimum), I really don't think it would be worth it.

42 minutes ago, EaglePrince said:

There are also some ads in Tapatalk from which only Tapatalk gets money if I'm not mistaken, and getting rid of them is overpriced in my opinion.

Yeah, sadly there are some ads on there. I haven't seen any as of yet myself, but I did try to disable the setting for them and Tapatalk wouldn't let me unless I started a $10 a month subscription. Since Tapatalk is just a platform for accessing the site, and not the site itself, it's out of our control so there's no way realistically I could prevent them from doing this. But the actual site of SHN will remain ad-free, that I can promise everyone.

I just don't see any benefit of putting ads on here, this is a community site for public good, there's no way I should be profiting from this. Plus, virtually everybody uses adblockers these days anyway (including myself) so for what crumbs it would make anyway, it would probably end up turning more people away. Ads are distracting and annoying, and not the kind of thing we want to achieve here.

[EaglePrince 234]

I agree with everything.

Regarding an app for SHN, yes, that would give us more control about what can be done with the app, etc. But the price is indeed the problem, and in long term - I would say that a reliable website like we have it right now is far better than a website and a an app. (Expensive to keep it in the store, not trivial to make all features, fix all the bugs, support it for newer versions of the OS, and all that for both Android and iOS...)

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[Lord_Chris 270]

Just so you guys know, when viewing the forums from a mobile device now, you will be notified about Tapatalk directly, and be able to switch to the app straight away. See the below screenshot for details on this.

[EaglePrince 234]

That's very neat. :)

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