Neo Ark Cradle

Full Version: User Awaiting Activation Usergroup Permission Fix + Summer Plans
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Hi everyone,

In the past months, we have gotten several inquiries and emails from newly registered users. Users thinking they were immediately banned, or thinking they may have done something wrong. Basically people being confused and worried. In reality nobody did anything wrong, and unfortunately it is my fault this confusion came to be in the first place, as I was the one who made the setting in question.

Basically, our forum requires newly registered accounts to be activated by Administrators, as we've had history of some notorious ban evaders. Users awaiting activation could browse the forum, but not being able to post until their accounts were activated. However, an issue started when an user I won't name would create accounts to avoid bans, and while they were able to view the forum as an user awaiting activation, they'd use that information to harass our members, rather persistently. In order to avoid this happening, I went ahead and changed the permissions for the User Awaiting Activation usergroup so they would not be able to view the forum at all, save for the same sections they'd see as a Guest - or at least that was the plan.

Unfortunately, what I didn't anticipate was that instead of seeing an empty forum page due to the way I changed the settings, newly registered users would get a No Permission Page or something along the lines. This caused many a worry and confusion for a long time, which I feel pretty bad about in retrospect. After talking it over with the rest of the Staff, the account activation is not going away, but hopefully as of today, the permission issue should be fixed and there should not be any error messages anymore.

I deeply apologize to every new user, be it a posting newbie or lurker alike, for the confusion and complication. As always, if anyone has problems with their account, you can use our Contact Us page or send us a message on Twitter. Smile (If there are still issues, I'll give it another check.)



As for the summer, we'd like to shoot for the following goals:

- Finally, finally add the long due smileys our members have suggested to be added.
- Update our forum plugins to fix bugs and make things run more smoothly.
- Look into a nice forum style that offers a snazzier look than the default forum styles. (The default skin and the dark skin will not be going anywhere of course, if anyone wishes to stick to them.)
- Assign more Moderators to several forum sections that lack a Moderator, especially the ARC-V related ones.

Hopefully we can actually get them done and implemented by autumn the latest.

Lastly, as a side note, the site has been having hiccups here and there, people have been reporting to me that the forum was being down. Unfortunately I'm not sure about the exact causes at this point, but for the time being, the forum does eventually come back and everything is fine.

If anyone has comments or concerns, feel free to post in this thread, or make a thread in the Suggestions section.

Arynis