Important! Pls read

Just some minor changes:

All members now can bookmark content all over the Portal and even share these bookmarks with other users.

Thats a pretty useful tool that might help you to find interesting stuff again.

Another thing... in theory the new General Data Protection Regulation (BULLSHIT) requires kids under the age of 16 are not allowed to use Forums and social networks unless the parents allow it.

I hereby inform you that the Terms of Use have been updated to cover this. I wont put a checkbox or an age restriction on the registration page since... lets face it... kids will just confirm the setting or change the year of birth to whatever works for them.

There is no effective way to enforce this part of the data protection law and actually its not even my job to enforce it (from what I did understand).

right now I see the best protection in clear terms of use and privacy policies

since every technical solution can be easily bypassed its not even worth trying

you cant lock out kids from a gaming forum

I think in case of the SWAT Portal I am really close at fulfilling the new regulations.

I went through everything that we offer here and all data that is stored or shared with 3rd party services.

All of that is covered by the new Privacy Policies and Terms of use.

There is even the option to export all data that we store about users if they request that.

IPs are only stored for 7 days until they get deleted.

Everything that technically was possible has been applied.

I can not control what the server host stores or any services which collect data without my knowledge when its transfered from the client to the server.

The Portal has a SSL encryption, therefore I did my job has administrator.

The problem is that even if I do nothing wrong I have to prove it. That means I have to defend myself from claims even if they are not true and cover costs for lawyer etc.

There once was a time where the internet was free... now you are halfway in prison when you set up your own website.

Long time no updates right?

Well ok, here they come:

• Thx to sp00n, who reported a problem with old portal links (and also delivered a solution to this problem) 2867 dead links of the forum could be fixed. Nicely done! its much appreciated.
• The bright mobile skin is now really available to all members (a minor misconfiguration prevented it from working correctly -> more info about it on the Portal Guide.
• Ive spent the past weeks reading through dozens of manuals, guides, code snippets and tech references with the objective to optimize the Portal and its performance. Especially the performance on mobile devices.
  This resulted in a bunch of changes and optimizations which I verified step by step using various analytic tools. This being said I need to mention that I did performance tests starting at locations all over the world. Since we only have one server location the results vary depending on the connection paths. That is not going to change anytime soon. The test results also depend on the client hardware. Thats normal.
  However, as result the following changes were done.
  • All of the website data which does not by default has a compression now gets transfered as compressed data. This resulted especially on mobile devices in a 40% lower data transfer. PCs also benefit of this change but the impact is a bit lower due to more powerful hardware and faster i-net connections.
  • Mobile devices no longer will use high-res images related to the Portal styles. Instead smaller resolutions will be loaded which fit better to the small screens and also will improve the loading speed.
  • Certain web elements that are used on the PC are no longer displayed on mobile devices. This includes rank icons and sliders such as the one on the dashboard. These elements do not fit well on small screens and removing them clearly is good for the performance on mobile devices. On desktop browsers these elements are still visible.
  • Optimizations have been done to stylesheets and javascripts. Code has been compressed and where possible these elements are now loaded asynchrone which prevents that they can block the buildup of the page for a short duration.
  • Images got compressed (or are currently being compressed). Atm I am compressing +13.000 avatars (will be finished later this night).
  • The way how fonts are loaded has changes both for PC and mobile devices. Especially on mobile devices the header fonts that are used for categories and headlines are not being loaded anymore. This does not have performance reasons (at least not primary)... I just think its looks better to have smaller fonts on small mobile screens. Especially some headlines didnt look good using the font setting that is currently used on PC.
  • New security settings have been introduced which prevent script injection on the Portal.
  • I created new rulesets for browser caching. This will highly improve the speed once the website has been loaded for the first time.

Overall i think that the speed on mobile devices did improve very well but we also have to keep in mind that often the connection speed is slower and the website is being processed slower than on a PC due to the less powerful hardware. And yes, the Portal is not really a tiny website that instantly can be loaded.

It is as lightweight as I can make it without breaking anything now.

One observation I made is that the firefox browser on my mobile phone is really not the best choice. From all browsers I tested it was the slowest.

Chrome and Opera mini were the best choices when it comes down to loading speed.

One more thing to mention.

I belong to the people which dont do online banking. Yeah such people still exist.

Since I was practically nonstop busy working on the Portal I didnt notice that we got a bit more money than we needed for the Portal upgrade (because of bank transferals). Its not my intention to make any profits from this situation.

I will put that money away for the case that we add more features or have to do additional updates in the future.

Some information about the structural changes.

A few dozen forum boards have been merged or removed completely to simplify the structure.

Old news and spoiler threads are now part of the general discussions. News are now covered by our News system and since we have spoiler tags everywhere there is no need for any spoiler boards any longer.

Several games projects have been removed completely since they were no longer active.

The list of supported games has been shortened, while the generally less active games (with a few exceptions) have been moved into the category "other games". They are not gone but move a bit out of sight, allowing more recent games and games which had strong support in the past get more attention.

The Crossfire specific forums have been moved into the Freelancer specific boards (where they belong to) and have been separated into mod related and server related discussion boards. The cross-linking from the Freelancer boards to the Crossfire boards is no longer needed and has been removed.

Access rights to all these boards remain unchanged. However, if you experience any access problems to boards and categories that were able to use before you should open a ticket so i can take a look at the permissions of these areas.

dont make marvin depressed... he is doing his best

i know you are good at scrolling

thx for the offerc

its just... we finished that stuff already