Please read the first post entirely before posting.

Introduction
We've all seen the superhero movies and series. The superhere usually either has a supernatural ability or they use money to get an advancement over others and use that to fight crime.

To make it so that you can't just look up your favorite superhero character and name their ability, but actually have to put in some thought, I've come up with this forumgame.

Objective
You have to come up with a super ability that is completely electronically driven, as in, you don't actually have the ability yourself, but you use a device that grants you this ability, such as a grappling hook for climbing, a binoculars for super vision, etc.

The device must be somehow wearable, so you can carry it with you all the time and instantly use it. Performing an action to turn it on/off is allowed.

But here's where the interesting part comes in. It is a two stage process, and you have to describe both stages in your post.
- Stage one: Using all technology currently available on earth, you must be able to construct the device that would grant you that super power. Describe the assembly process, doesn't matter how chunky it is etc... For example: glue binoculars to glasses and glue that with a rotating mechanism to a hat for on/off.
- Stage two: describe how one could fabricate this to a device that is lightweight and easy to wear, and more preferably invisible to anyone. Given that superheros usually wear a costume to hide their identity, if it can be a part of this costume easily without it being bulky/heavy, that is perfectly allowed. Basically, the super enemy should not be able to see where the superpower is located on you to be able to take a perfectly aimed snipershot and disable your device, rendering your superpower useless. For example: superhero wears a helmet. It has a hidden camera lens with 500x optical zoom in there and the visor has a screen in it.

Rules
There are a few rules that you need to follow that will otherwise invalidate your post. If your post is invalidated, please don't post it, or it will otherwise be removed.

Your post must both have stage one and stage two.

Also tell us why.

Enjoy.

Hi there,

I'm going to move to a new webhosting service. Actually, I already have the new webhosting service arranged, but the forum is still on the old hosting provider currently.

I'm not sure when I will migrate everything just yet. I will have to make some changes and I do plan to make things as seamlessly as possible. But it is impossible to do this without a moment where I have to put the forum in read-only mode, and depending on how long the database transfer takes and how long it takes for DNS to catch up afterwards, the expected downtime is going to be between half an hour and an hour.

Because I already know this is going to happen somewhere in december, I thought to let you know in advance. I will be on Discord during the migration too, so you can ask for support in case things are not working for you after an hour. Once I know exactly when I will be migrating, I will post an update here too, and one once the migration is done.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

This topic has been moved to Knytt Stories.

https://nifflas.lp1.nl/index.php?topic=7182.0

So, you went to the forum and you saw that things look a bit different, right?

Well, your eyes are working correctly. Congratulations.

So indeed things are different. I've migrated the forum from 1.1.19 to 2.0.15.

This was necessary given that my hosting provider upgraded php and the lowest supported php version, 5.6 already broke the old forum, not to mention that the forum doesn't work at all on php version 7. Given that php 5.6 is end of life, it may happen this year that my hosting provider removes php 5.6 alltogether. So I knew I had to upgrade.

I did a test upgrade to 2.0.15 a long time ago and knew that it would severely break the forum's main functions. It basically stopped me from upgrading the forum in the past. Themes didn't work anymore, and all the installed mods didn't work. This basically screams: lots of work. I don't have the time to migrate the forum and get it exactly back into the state it used to be, so this basically meant I could not upgrade, or upgrade but with huge concequences in terms of functionality.

But with php 5.6 being end-of-life, I basically have to. So not upgrading just is not an option anymore. I did another upgrade at the end of 2018 to do some testing to see what breaks, what I can repair and what I can alter in order to make the forum work for years to come.

A new theme was definitely going to be necessary, so I made a post asking for help, and Wohali came to the rescue. Huge shout out to him for his amazing work with the theme.

So the theme is covered then. He showed me one theme that he was working on, and for a while my plan was to just support one theme. But it started to itch, so I asked him to prepare the theme in such way that it would be easy to modify. He asked why, and I told him that it would allow me to copy the theme, change the colors a bit and be able to give support for multiple themes. He said he could make that easy by giving support for multiple themes directly from this theme. He did, and it works amazing, and its easy for me to work with too.

If you want to change the theme, there are 2 methods you can use.

You can either go into your profile, look and layout, find the Nifflas theme, click change, and there you have a listbox with all the options you can choose.

Alternatively, you can do this by appending variant=color to the end of the url as parameter. So either index.php?variant=blue or index.php?action=something&variant=white.
Basically if you already have a ? with something behind it, you append with &, if not, you append with ?.

Here are links to the current theme. Note these links will bring you to the index. Press the back button on your browser (or if it opened in a new tab, close the tab) to return here, then refresh the page to get this post in the new theme.

Blue (WaDF style)
Red (Knytt Underground style)
Green (Knytt Underground style)
White (Knytt Stories (in KU) style)

Given that we use SMF 2.0.15, the forum software itself has changed, so things don't work exactly the same.

I've added an Unread posts at the top. This is also accessible from the usermenu at the top right, where you can also find the all recent posts link.

The old forum had support for giving eachother a hidden star with special permissions attached to it. Unfortunately, that part is no longer possible. The special permissions are now based on how many posts you have, which currently is set to 100 posts. I've chosen to no longer make your post count hidden, as that is basically the indicator now. The forum rules about mentioning someone's postcount does not change though, its just that you can see them easily now.

Things like the arcade are not present and neither the ability to see who gave you a hidden star. You can still give someone a hidden star, but I can't track them, so it doesn't do much other than that. I may remove the feature if it seems that people toy with it and press the button like 100 times on a user, so don't do that, okay.

The index used to have an image for each game too. It was hacked into the theme. It may still be possible to hack this in, but I just don't have the time for it, so I've scrapped that feature too. Maybe in the future, but no promises.

I think I've mentioned everything now that I did, but I may have missed something.

If something is not working for you, or if you have questions, feel free to contact me or one of the other members of the staff. You can find us in the Discord or you can send a PM. Either case will get you a response for sure.

Also, the reason why many things have not come back, is due to it being 2019. What I mean by this is that time causes for change, and with change, some of the old stuff is simply not relevant. For example, we used to have a link to Nifflas' homepage. Given that his homepage currently is quite empty because of loss of data, I haven't bothered to program that back in. The arcade was not being used for many years and was broken, so I did not look into bringing that back. The activity on the forum is mostly concentrated on Knytt Stories levels nowadays and the activity is not like it was in 2012 either. So the decisions I've made are with this in my mind.

I hope you understand.

If you have suggestions, you can also reply in this topic. I can't promise that I will honor your suggestions, but I will definitely consider it.

And I may have missed something very obvious, so don't hesitate to bring something up. You already have a no, and by asking it may turn into a yes.

Anyway, enjoy the new forum.

- LPChip

As some of you may know, we run an old version of SMF (The forum software). SMF is supported up to php 5.5. In the past we ran php 5.4 and all was great. Then php kept developing to version 7, and slowly, ISP's started to drop support for SMF until the latest 5 version, which is 5.6.

We currently run 5.6 but given that this version of SMF doesn't actually support it, using hacks, we're still using it, but not everything works as it's supposed to do.

Now, php 5.6 is already quite old, and support for it will be dropped at some point. I've tested this version of SMF with php 7 and simply put, it will not run. I have no control over my ISP deciding to drop support for php 5.6 so in order to keep the site up and running, we have to migrate to a newer version of SMF.

SMF 2 does run on php 7, and I can convert the database to this php version without problem. But about everything else will not work. This includes the way the site looks, and all mods that have been done in the past, such as the theme switcher, spoiler tag, hidden stars, etc.

But we do need to go to SMF 2 at some point. Although most of these features mentioned above are not mandatory to a working version of the site, the theme is one that really is mandatory.

I do not have time unfortunately to create a new theme for SMF 2, and that's why I'm requesting help. I am aware that we will lose support for things such as giving stars, but at least the forum will still work.

So, if you have experience with php and creating a skin for SMF, let me know.

As a reward for helping me out with this, I will make you a moderator on the forums on the new version.

Thanks for reading this. Hope to hear from you soon.

PS: you can reach me either by replying here, sending me a PM or getting in contact through Discord.

The past few days were a bit hectic...

Apparently when I was curious if our forum would run php 5.6, it broken the index of the site. Every subpage would load, just not the index.

Thanks to those who mentioned this to me, I started to investigate. Apparently This version of the forum and php 5.6 don't work well together. Some mods simply broke, including the simple theme switcher, that I unfortunately can't fix.

I attempted to upgrade the forums to SMF 2.0.15 but that made things a lot worse. Many of the mods are simply not compatible with SMF 2.0.15, so that's an even bigger set-back than what we currently have.

In the process I moved us to an isolated spot on my hosting so this can't happen again, and I have more control over what I want specifically to this forum compared to all other hosting stuff I do. A side-effect of this, is that the url has changed. We used to have nifflas.lpchip.nl, now we have nifflas.lp1.nl. The site is still the same thing, so don't worry about that. I considered trying to go back to the old url, but in the past day, I have done so many things to fix small issues, that I'm not really feeling into going through that whole process once more to set it back to nifflas.lpchip.nl. There currently is a redirect in place, but I strongly urge you to update your bookmarks to point to the new https://nifflas.lp1.nl site instead.

Given that I have started to use Discord more, the following changes have been made.

Fubaka has transferred ownership of the Discord to me. Because of the good job he did with managing the Discord, I've asked if he wants to remain being one of the admins for the Discord.

He gladly accepted it.

Given that I think its only fair, I've also promoted Fubaka to become a moderator here on the forums.

Given that I haven't seen Miss Paula nor Siam_Jai on the forums for a while, I've removed their Super Moderator Powers. As I've seen J frequently active on places and he generally knows what happens, I've promoted his Moderator status to Super Moderator.

Congrats Fubaka and Jace on your promotions.

And lastly, if you have questions regarding anything, you can now also ask Fubaka.