Important! Pls read

Ok, I just finished the fine-tuning of the Portal settings. That took much longer than expect.

The data rebuild btw. did successfully complete. That means that the new software converted all the data that was transfered from the old Portal into this new system.

With other words: the new Portal will run smooth now.

Just a bit info about what has changed in the past few days.

• The filebase which still has missing files (I am working on that) now offers the option to create support threads. These threads will be created automatically in the specific game categories here in the Forum.
• The menu structure has been organzed a bit to fit even on smaller monitors without hiding important stuff.
• All usergroups got updated with new permissions and sometimes restrictions. Generally I can say that users have much more editing rights and Moderators and Super-Moderators also got more permissions and access rights.
• There have been changes to the Calendar categories. Events which fit into these categories get highlighted by colors. Moderators, Super-Moderators and Event-Managers got additional editing rights.
• New Forum Labels have been added to many boards.
• Users can register using their Facebook or Google accounts. Existing members can link their Portal account with Facebook and Google on their member profiles.
• We have a Discord server now and the Portal is directly linked to it. It will synchronize data with Discord and also show the online members and channel status here on the Portal.
• I have created a list of all currently available Trophies. https://swat-portal.com/forum/wcf/index.php?trophy-listx/
• The Timeline feature has been filled with date. It will show the key events in the history of the SWAT Portal. -> https://swat-portal.com/forum/wcf/index.php?timeline/
• Members which use mobile devices and like to use a bright style can enable the option "Enable predefined mobile style" in the general settings of the member control panel. This option is by default off and it only affects how the Portal looks on mobile devices. On your PC either the default style will display or one of the many style choices.
• The lower part of the Portal now has an embedded google translator. You can activate it to translate pretty much everything on the Portal.
• On the lower right corner of the screen is a conversation button. It extends the normal conversations and turns them into a chat. If you dont like this chat feature and want to restore the original way how conversations work you can change the settings on your control panel.
• On the Dashboard menu option you will find the Clan Management. Here members can create their own clan. They can choose the name, the clan-tag, the clan-logo and header image. There are different types of clans with different ways how members can join. Clans can invite members, members can apply for membership or the clan can be open to all. These clan pages get administrated exclusively by the clan. That means the clan decides about the structure and the clan does the settings. There is a member management, a role management, clan forums with various access rights, activity trackers and even the possibility to create custom pages (for rules, info, etc.).

Now that the setting and installations are done I will focus on restoring the file of our filebase. Atm only 21% of the old files are accessible. Ill try to get the other stuff back. It might take 1-2 weeks.

Aside from a synchronization bot there are no other bots yet.

Ive just set up a basic channel - nothing more.

I am not very used to Discord (Ive only recently installed because I needed help with something).

Whatever Discord channels, bots, etc. we might need will be set up. I just need feedback from the community about what is needed.

yeah going to work on that

on the dashboard sidebar

The filebase is working again.

forget about the 1-2 weeks that i mentioned.

I wrote a new importer today which did the job instead of me uploading the files manually.

Ive been busy with detail work during the past days.

A few things worth to mention.

• There have been a few issues with the google translate widget at the bottom of the page when using mobile devices. I have adjusted the widget style to fit better on the screen and not mess up the mobile design. Also the autodetect has been disabled so there are no annoying translation messages at the top of the screen anymore.
• By request we have a rank overview now. You can find it in the members menu.
• By request I have added info boxes again.
• Our gallery now is directly linked with youtube. That means if you link a video the gallery will fetch the name of the video, its description and also its preview image.
• Today we had a few spam bots on the Portal, so I have adjusted the security settings to be more strict with bot detections (hopefully that will be enough).
• I have installed a new cache system to the server which should improve the loading speed of all Portal pages significantly.
• The way how the server deals with transaction logs has been changed.
  Explanation: everytime a setting (any userdata, posts, comments, likes, etc.) is written to the server database a log entry is written to the servers HDD. That could easily lead to thousands of HDD write accesses per second just for writing logs which would slow down the database performance. Now with the changes in place the server would keep the log data in memory and only write them once per second to the HDD. This will result in less frequent HDD writes and much faster database performance.
• The Portal now make use of an image proxy function. That means if members include images from external websites in their posts, the Portal no longer will link directly to these images. The Portal will download these images and store them here for 14 days. So the images you see in the posts are actually on the SWAT server now. This prevents that other websites can fetch data from our Portal users while loading these images. After these 14 days the images will be deleted from the SWAT server. However, if members open threads which contain such images again the proxy will fetch and store these images again for another 14 days.
  This is good for the data security of the users and also gives the Portal a 100% secure rating on modern browsers.
• A few days ago I wrote that all data that is transfered between server and users now gets encrypted. This is one of the many requirements of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR/DSGVO) which will go into effect on May 25th. Right now I am going through these requirements step by step to ensure that the new Portal fulfills this new Privacy Policy. The use of the already mentioned image proxy also belongs to these requirements.
  Ive mentioned before that the Portal is linked with other websites and services. Youtube, Google, Facebook, Discord. All data exchanged with these services is encrypted and anonymised. Exception to the anonymisation is when the user agrees that data is shared between the services. e.g. linking the Portal username with the Discord username.

Lots of detail work. But I think its worth doing it right now.

We still have lots of stuff to do.

• Wiki and Lexicon are some major to-do topics. I will jump in here to help as soon Ive the other topics covered.
• On the old Portal we had a tour which explained the most important features to new members. I'd like to set up a Portal page which explains the different features and function of the Portal to our members.
• Some security settings might need some fine tuning (dunno yet).
• I did announce structural changes to the Portal. We will have to discuss them in detail. Especially the Forum structure should be less complicated.
• The filebase currently looks a bit chaotic since we don't have that categorized view anymore. As far as I was able to find out there is a possibility to restore the original look. The plugin for that is currently rewritten and should be ready to use in 1-2 months.
• Discord settings... i still have to do the Discord settings.
• + probably a thousand other minor details which I current cant even imagine.

A few additional changes that are important.

• The Wiki is to about 90% restored. Only some entries of the Crossfire category are missing. That is work in progress.
• The old Bugtracker entries which were not "done" have been included into the new Ticketsystem. It simply didnt make much sense to transfer stuff that no longer is needed. Suggestions also have been transfered but only if they are still valid on the new Portal. A bunch of Portal suggestions are no longer valid because the new Portal meanwhile covers the suggested changes.
• A few Forum boards and categories have been removed since they are no longer needed. Further changes to the Forum structure will be done soon.
• The antispam settings are going through some fine-tuning. We had a few bots which managed to post their crap but in the end that were just sporadic cases. Over at lancersreactor more than 20 spambots manage to register per day (the email validtion over there doesnt work correctly atm which is the only reason why they can not flood the website with spam)... so compared to that the SWAT Portal is fairly secure.
• Speaking of that... I fixed the problem that prevented that SWAT Portal emails could be delivered to certain email providers (e.g. hotmail).
• Currently google and other search engines will not provide many search entries if you look for Portal related stuff. That is because the entire link structure of the Portal has changed and everything has to be indexed again. I have no idea how long that will take. So far only 750 urls have been parsed by google (less on bing). That is only 1% of the entire Portal. It might take several weeks or months before the entire portal is completely indexed.
• After meanwhile +2 weeks on the new Portal software I am meanwhile able to compare the website performance. The old Portal had very fluctuating loading speeds between 1.2sec to 2.1secs per page (using a 100mbit connection). The new Portal does the same job in 0.3 seconds average.
• You might have noticed that the old Crossfire Website (crossfire.swat-portal.com) does not exist anymore. All content has meanwhile beeen included directly into the Portal. The subdomain is still valid and will remain valid. It will lead directly to the new content here on the Portal.
  Reason for that change simply is the fact that all the expernal websites we had required too much administrative attention.
  Every website, no matter if it was the Bloodguard clanpage, the Phoenix Legion Fleet or the Crossfire Server website required to be updated regulary with content and also required to get software updates. Doing that for one or two websites is ok. Doing it for so many websites is a nightmare.
  The clan websites bg.swat-portal.com and phoenix-legion.swat-portal.com have been integrated into our new Clan&Guild Management. The subdomain links are still valid.
  The Crossfire Server website crossfire.swat-portal.com now is part of the Portal which allows us to integrate much more functionality into the Server related pages. All content that existed on the old Website is now part of the new Portal pages (and has been updated).
  Big advantage is that the administration of this content is alot easier and that content updates can be done more frequently since all Portal areas are compatible to one another.
• There is an ongoing project that I am working on related to the new Portal.
  Everything is new, everything is shiny but not every member knows how to use all the new stuff.
  Thats why I am working on a Portal guide which will explain all the different new Portal features in detail. I think that will help members to understand some of the settings and discover stuff they have not noticed before.

Currently I am cleaning the server from +15 years of junk.

Old websites, old backups, old Portal versions, old scripts, 338gb of stuff that I considered to be "maybe useful someday". Some of that stuff is still operational and doing its job in the background -> and wasting performance and resources.

Time to get rid of it.

Btw. the Server will be a bit slow while I am delete all that stuff. There are more than 700.000 files and I think most of the stuff is not needed anymore.

I finished cleaning up. only 200gb and 350k files r left (thats not bad considering that there are currently 2 Portal backups which will be removed once all content from the old Portal has been restored).

The new Portal alone consists of +94k files.

I found a few nice gems in the old TLR backups

Will upload it to the gallery now.

lexicon will be done tomorrow

Ok since the Wiki and the Lexicon now have been transfered from the old Portal Backup I have shup down the old website now.

We dont need it anymore.

After 3 1/2 weeks the new Portal is fully operational and I am totally exhausted. But I think it was worth it.

In the upcoming days and weeks I will do a few structural changes to the forum to simplify the structure a bit. I actually already started with that but require a bit more time to think about what works best.

Feedback of course is welcome.

Just reminder for the clans. You can register your own clanpage if you want.

The clan managment allows you to design the stuff the way you want and it allows you to have a member management and a custom Forum structure with access right that you can set up.

You can find Clan Management under the Dashboard Menu.

There you also can find the new Portal Guide.

This is an ongoing project where I try to explain the different features of the Portal.

The descriptions so far are relative simple... but i think with the help of the community (questions and suggestions are welcome) we can set up a guide which can explain how the Portal works in a more detailed way.

Introduction