The Update Formally Known as January.
I hope you've all had a good new year and most of January so far. it's been very cold
The usual January things have happened, its been really quiet but also hectic at work and everyone is busy doing their own things. I hope at least you're all having a good time.
For this year i'm going to try to mix it up and do numbered updates, partially because I have been getting late on the months, but also so that I can have more substantive updates when I do them. We'll see how it goes.
Rotting Angels of the Omnipotent Eye Site Friendship
A new addition to the site links/friends page is the 'Rotting Angels of the Omnipotent Eye'. A very new and rapidly growing site with a unique design and a general theme. The topics are varied and somewhat similar to ours. The site aims to be half imageboard half forum.
The admin seems nice and once you get used to the website it is fun to browse. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but if you are so inclined feel free to take a look at it for yourself 🙂
2025 goals
- Alternate frontend
As shown in the last update, I have been working on a more traditional forum style frontend for the site. This will never be the primary frontend as its only being developed by me, but it may serve as some users preferred option and it may perform better in some scenarios for others.
This has not had much further development in the past month due to christmas and usual december/january things. I am however looking to work on it again.
- Working on addressing site issues
There is a list of things that i'd like to have changed about the site, so I will be slowly going through those and seeing where changes can be made or things can be implemented
- backend 2.0 update
it's been mentioned a few times, but if you were not aware: The Flarum 2.0 release will start rolling out at the middle of the year. I think it will be best for the site to not roll it out immediately, although I will test it with a like for like setup on my personal machine 🙂
This will likely affect the alternate front end as well, so I aim to have it released as compatible with v1.8.5 (current iteration of the forum).
- Profile Comments
As stated towards the end of last year. We had added a profile comments function to the site. The function has been used and whilst it is somewhat primitive, I think it works as it is. Depending on if there is further development of the feature we may see it be retired or changed to something more suitable. Unless there are massive issues with it right now though i'm fairly happy with it.
Site Advertising update
Over the past year I have focused mainly on 4chan for advertising due to the ease of use, banner support and flexibility. I will still be using it into this year, however I think i'm going to try for a couple of months to focus advertising efforts on other platforms for now.
Both Google and Reddit ads, which I have had large issues with before, have reworked various elements of their advertising so I will be trialing using both again. (We actually had the google ads account suspended due to the spam, working on it)
Spam and issues
Recently we've been having issues with spam accounts and users. I've made some tweaks to be able to react to it quicker, although until I action things they do end up staying there.
In theory if they get flagged past a threshold now it should auto handle it. I'll tweak those numbers to make them work over the next few weeks.
Tags
In March of last year, I went through the tags and rejigged them in order to make them less niche and hopefully easier to use. As its been almost a year since the changes i'd like to hear some feedback/suggestions relating to the current tags. Are there enough tags? Is there anything that doesn't have a tag that you'd like to see? Things like that.
Please use the suggestions/feedback tag for that and other ideas. The comments on these blogs will be seen but can be a bit harder to organise/find.
Suggestions and Feedback Tag Link
Thanks
Thank you all as always for reading and using the site. I hope you continue to get use out of the site.
For a more detailed read on the state of the site and a look back over 2024, check out the 2 year anniversary post
For suggestions to improve the site and other things, please go to this page
Feedback and Meta chat for 2nd anniversary
Track Forum Progress
Forum page archive (old ToS and PP)
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