The Energon Pub

News Credits: 3642 · Mon Jun 02, 2025 1:41 am

First Gen wrote:Ohhhh baby, now you're TALKING!!! Love all the ideas listed. I think you're on the perfect track to really make Seibertron.com the premier TF site.

SEIBERTRON TIL WE DIE!

Welcome to the Beta Bots testing group, First Gen!

News Credits: 3642 · Mon Jun 02, 2025 1:41 am

? SECURITY, DEBUGGING & CODE STRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Reviewed and addressed security reports submitted
• Investigated and mitigated multiple potential XSS vulnerabilities throughout core site files
• Refactored and relocated common reusable security and utility functions into a new shared file to streamline `core.php`
• Implemented and tested site-wide security signature logic to detect unauthorized tampering or suspicious activity
• Resolved legacy issues with improperly escaped user input and outdated encoding practices in public-facing pages
• Began methodical cleanup of smiley BBCode behavior in forums to resolve display and overlap issues
• Reviewed and patched additional edge cases in form submissions that previously bypassed encoding or filtering layers
• Hardened security headers and cleaned up redundant or deprecated security handling throughout admin and forum sections

News Credits: 1014 · Mon Jun 02, 2025 11:39 am

Seibertron wrote:
First Gen wrote:Ohhhh baby, now you're TALKING!!! Love all the ideas listed. I think you're on the perfect track to really make Seibertron.com the premier TF site.

SEIBERTRON TIL WE DIE!

Welcome to the Beta Bots testing group, First Gen!

LET'S GO BABY!!!

Wed Jun 04, 2025 1:50 pm

Some feedback thoughts:

The site tabs, how are they supposed to behave? Sometimes I have to click the tab for the sub-menu to persist, other times I can get away with hovering. Still other times, it didn't matter which — I had to move my mouse cursor fast or the sub-menu disappeared.

The size of the indentation when using a list format in a post has always annoyed me, even on the old site. Just want to put that out there.

Does mission submission have to require inputting a CAPTCHA? I'll sometimes try to join a mission that has only several seconds remaining until closure.

I miss the compactness of the tables used for the Registry, Armor, and Weapons pages.

News Credits: 34 · Wed Jun 04, 2025 3:58 pm

Silver Wind wrote:
Does mission submission have to require inputting a CAPTCHA? I'll sometimes try to join a mission that has only several seconds remaining until closure.
I miss the compactness of the tables used for the Registry, Armor, and Weapons pages.

FWIW, the CAPTCHA is some really old code that was removed years and years ago, and is probably showing up by accident. You can ignore it, the mission will still go through if you leave it blank. As to spacing... there's a post in the feedback forum that might interest you!

In general, I'd say don't sweat the layout details at the moment, especially in HMW. Its old code isn't playing too well yet with the new site structure and will get tuned later.

News Credits: 3642 · Tue Jun 17, 2025 12:47 pm

I just added all Seibertronians who last visited Seibertron.com's forums in the past 6 months to the BETA testing group. They would have had to have been logged in.

Time for feedback. I'm buckling up and putting my helmet on now!

News Credits: 1014 · Tue Jun 17, 2025 3:32 pm

It's gonna be a bit of a shock but a welcome one

News Credits: 3642 · Tue Jun 17, 2025 3:45 pm

First Gen wrote:It's gonna be a bit of a shock but a welcome one

Lots of work to be done still im trying to get most major things completed in time for Seibertron.com's official 25th anniversary which is on June 26th.

News Credits: 60 · Fri Jul 18, 2025 12:05 pm

I don't know if this is just a local issue, but it looks like the images are broken on on the front page for the "Recent Twincast" section- For my machine this seems to be only impacted on the homepage...

News Credits: 3642 · Sat Jul 19, 2025 12:19 am

kuhlio wrote:I don't know if this is just a local issue, but it looks like the images are broken on on the front page for the "Recent Twincast" section- For my machine this seems to be only impacted on the homepage...

the images on the homepage are working. what browser are you using? can you for a refresh?

News Credits: 60 · Sat Jul 19, 2025 9:49 am

I was running Chrome- just re-checked and everything is looking good!

News Credits: 3642 · Sat Jul 19, 2025 1:21 pm

kuhlio wrote:I was running Chrome- just re-checked and everything is looking good!

It looked like a loss of internet error when the images don't load like that

Wed Aug 13, 2025 11:44 pm

Does the thread title need to appear in every post? Seems overkill.
My 2 cents.

Mon Sep 29, 2025 1:47 am

This seems like it might be more resource-intensive than the old version - like it loads slower.
Also, can you maybe pick a background image that wasn't made for a mid-'90s monitor?

We're talking some hilariously giant pixels here.

Seibertron_background_resolution.png

EDIT: Also, can you PLEASE pick a caption contest winner already? It's been going for what, five smegging years now (and has even been flooded with spam from a bot?), with no winner picked. If you're just completely giving up on it, why keep it in the side widgets?

EDIT 2: Can you at all block the AI & bot crap from being treated as users? Especially since the Google one can apparently spam us?

News Credits: 10 · Fri May 15, 2026 2:30 pm

Not sure where the best place to ask this is so I'm just going to do it here, when you are viewing a thread there used to be an icon on a post to indicate if it is new since you last viewed the thread. That appears to have vanished, is that supposed to have happened?

News Credits: 3642 · Fri May 15, 2026 2:45 pm

Omegatron. wrote:Not sure where the best place to ask this is so I'm just going to do it here, when you are viewing a thread there used to be an icon on a post to indicate if it is new since you last viewed the thread. That appears to have vanished, is that supposed to have happened?

Are you talking about when you are viewing a forum and it shows the topic list?

News Credits: 10 · Fri May 15, 2026 3:52 pm

No, within the topic itself.

News Credits: 34 · Fri May 15, 2026 3:56 pm

>snip< Omegatron replied again while I was typing so nvm. >snip<

Those new post action icons are... large, though. Take up a significant portion of the post header's vertical space.

News Credits: 3642 · Fri May 15, 2026 3:56 pm

Omegatron. wrote:No, within the topic itself.

Where was the icon? was it with the edit and quote buttons near the post subject title? I made some changes last night, it's highly possible I modified some code accidentally without thinking it through clearly.

News Credits: 3642 · Fri May 15, 2026 3:57 pm

Glyph wrote:>snip< Omegatron replied again while I was typing so nvm. >snip<

Those new post action icons are... large, though. Take up a significant portion of the post header's vertical space.

They're taller than the old ones were but the subject title is significantly smaller than it used to be also, as a trade off. I can make them a little smaller if needed but I also wanted them a little bigger for mobile devices.

News Credits: 10 · Fri May 15, 2026 4:00 pm

Seibertron wrote:Where was the icon? was it with the edit and quote buttons near the post subject title? I made some changes last night, it's highly possible I modified some code accidentally without thinking it through clearly.

I think it was where the permanent link button for a particular reply was.

News Credits: 3642 · Fri May 15, 2026 4:01 pm

Seibertron wrote:
Glyph wrote:>snip< Omegatron replied again while I was typing so nvm. >snip<

Those new post action icons are... large, though. Take up a significant portion of the post header's vertical space.

They're taller than the old ones were but the subject title is significantly smaller than it used to be also, as a trade off. I can make them a little smaller if needed but I also wanted them a little bigger for mobile devices.

I think i'm going to get rid of the left side column of posts as well as the motto, weapon and signatures. I haven't quite decided how I want to implement it yet. It will definitely be influenced by how social media sites handle replies. I might work on our user profiles first to modernize them quite a bit so that they're more useful, especially with the various user related features I have planned with the S.T.A.R.S. program.

I'm open to suggestions and ideas. Or I might leave it how it is when on a computer, but eliminate/modify those areas that are an issue on just mobile devices.

News Credits: 34 · Sun May 17, 2026 3:13 pm

Seibertron wrote:
Glyph wrote:Those new post action icons are... large, though. Take up a significant portion of the post header's vertical space.
They're taller than the old ones were but the subject title is significantly smaller than it used to be also, as a trade off.

It's not just the raw vertical space, it's that they introduce a big, very noticeable / distracting empty space above the post header. The buttons are currently actually larger than the post title itself! I also don't think they should be on the top left (in reality, floating-somewhat-left-of-centre due to the left sidebar), as that's generally not where people look for contextual action buttons.

A picture being worth a thousand words:

new_forum.png

vs

old_forum.png

If you want the larger icons, I'd suggest floating them to the right and probably only having the Quote button as the default/main action, with others hidden under a dropdown from that action if needed. (For regular users, there's only Quote and Report anyway - only mods/admin see more AFAIK. And Report should probably always be visible but de-emphasised.). You may want to style them differently on mobile where they need a bigger touch target, while desktop can be much less intrusive.

(BTW, see that little orange pip on the old forum screenshot that's been replaced by the link icon on the new forum? That's what Omegatron is talking about. It was orange for new posts, grey for already-seen ones.)

Seibertron wrote:I think i'm going to get rid of the left side column of posts as well as the motto, weapon and signatures. I haven't quite decided how I want to implement it yet. It will definitely be influenced by how social media sites handle replies.

OK, but... why? I don't mean that as whining about change, I mean: what's the goal? It's a forum, so the use pattern is long threads and persistent, contextual posts. Social media layouts SUCK for any kind of discussion or long thread - they're designed for standalone posts on a continuous timeline and lots of individual, unthreaded replies. It's a different design for a different paradigm.

Not arguing against modernising a lot of the presentation, don't get me wrong. It needs it. I could see the sidebar collapsed into a user profile box, maybe showing the name & avatar etc on the main post and the extended profile on hover or something. Just concerned for hurting core functionality by applying the wrong paradigm because it looks cool.

All the above meant constructively, I'm not here to slam the effort.