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