Category: Website

New websites

Today our brand new websites, thebuggenie.com and thebuggenie.org has finally gone public. This has been one of the main reasons the upcoming 3.3 release has dragged on, since we wanted to have a new and stable environment to support us going forward.

With our new thebuggenie.org website, we can finally put some more effort behind some long outstanding community contributions, such as the excellent translation job done in our translation team, highlight select contributions, and do more with our code repository.

Our brand new thebuggenie.com website fleshes out the functionality found on our old website, but also adds some long-awaited features such as an online, up-to-date, searchable knowledge base, training courses and a new account management panel for all our hosted customers.

It may still take a little while for the DNS pointers to update, but we do hope you like what we’ve done. Either way, please let us know via comments here, or via email: websites@zegeniestudios.net

Website refresh

Hey all!

Before we could post the new beta version of our 3.2 release, there were several changes that needed to be made in the website infrastructure to prepare for some of the features we want to add while we polish the beta into a worthy RC. Today we launched the new and polished website, and we hope you find it just as easy to use as before. As you can see, we’ve tried to keep the same structure as before, but also wanted to add more content to several section, such as the new “help” and “community” sections.

Let us know if you find any bugs 🙂

Known issue with password recovery

In the latest version of The Bug Genie 3.1, there is a bug with the password recovery feature – emails are set without the password provided. This affects our tracker and any installations you have.

This is a known issue and will be fixed in the next release of The Bug Genie 3.1 – due out after testing.

In the meantime, if you are unable to access your account as you have forgotten your password, please post on the forums or email support@thebuggenie.com, and we will reset your password for you.

Marking threads as solved, and logging in with OpenID – latest forum improvements

We are currently making a few improvements to the forum, which will help make using the forum a better experience.

First of all, marking topics as solved

A feature that is often on support forums is a ‘mark as solved’ function. When your problem is solved, you can let everyone know what post in the thread solved the issue, and this brings many benefits:

  • We know a problem is solved, so we don’t have to come back to your thread, making our life easier
  • It’s easier for us to see what problems still need solving, saving us time
  • Other people with your problem can jump straight to the solution, saving them time
  • You can be satisfied that your problem is all wrapped up and done with, giving you more satisfaction

Threads marked as solved get a little green tick wherever they are shown, and clicking this tick jumps straight to the solution.

We have turned this on in our ‘problem-solving’ forums, though we can always add it to more if necessary.

To mark a thread as solved, just click the little tick. Please note that only you and the moderators/administrators can do this, so please be vigilant. The tick is found near the quote button:

Tick button on toolbar

And secondly, logging in with OpenID

Having multiple accounts everywhere is a pain. One of the new features in The Bug Genie 3.2 is OpenID support, and it would be a little contradictory if we supported it on our tracker but not the forums! With this in mind, once the theme is fixed, OpenID support will be added to the login page, so you don’t have to create yet another account to make use of the forums.

This is now available! You can link your existing accounts to an OpenID if you want, go to your user control panel and choose Profile.

Website improvements

We had a small amount of maintenance work today, with the main result being that we have now moved to our shiny new VPS.

If you can access the issue tracker and forums again, the move is complete! If no, just wait a little bit for the DNS to update, it may be a bit slow.

The main improvement is everything is a lot faster now, a concern many of you had with our old hosting. In addition to this, the random bursts of inaccessibility should now be gone too. Some more exciting things will be coming soon, too!

If you find anything not working, please do let us know so we can get it all working.

Font Fun

One of the plans in The Bug Genie 3.2 is a new font, which will improve clarity as well as improve support for italic characters and foreign scripts. We want to get stuff right, so we have switched the website over to one of the candidate fonts, Google’s Open Sans, and we would very much like to get your feedback.

Please feel free to drop us a line on IRC, forums or via the email – we’d love to know your opinion on this new font. We would especially like to know if you find it more or less readable and pleasant – as clearly the font’s going to be a disaster if you can’t read it!

A few Forum changes

A short while ago we reported that we were improving our anti-spam measures on the forums. The tests were a success and so the need for post-approval when you register has been removed. Nobody has appeared to be adversely affected by the internal measures we have to prevent spam, but if you are, please get in touch with us.

Also, a Gravatar mod has been installed. If you have a Gravatar, feel free to turn it on in Avatar preferences.

Updated anti-spam measures on the forums

We have upgraded our anti-spam measures we use on the forums to help cut down on the number of spammy users and posts. While you don’t see the posts, due to a previous change, there is a lot of overhead for us to manually approve good and bad posts – and it also means that your perfectly legitimate threads and posts may take a while to appear, due to the approval system we have in place currently.

Now, we will automatically look up usernames, email addresses and IP addresses against the Stop Forum Spam database, and if a match is found then the user will be automatically banned.

If this does improve the situation, we may be able to lax our previous measures, but this all depends on how this new solution performs. On a similar note, therefore, if you are banned by the new system inadvertently, please contact us at support@thebuggenie.com, and we will reactivate your account and tweak the system.

Forum spam and countermeasures

Unfortunately, the last few weeks we’ve seen a sudden increase in forum spam and fake postings. We’ve waited to see if it would pass, but apparently it isn’t. To try and stop this, we’ve put some restrictions on new users forum posts – all forum posts from newly registered users will have to be approved by a forum moderator before it is shown. We will try and approve these as fast as possible – and as soon as we moderate a “real” topic, we will move the user into the non-restricted users group. Hopefully, this won’t have a huge effect on forum usage, and it will *not* apply to existing users.

This also means we are looking for more forum moderators. If you’ve been frequenting our forums and want to have a go, drop us a line ( support@thebuggenie.com ), pop by the live chat, or use the feedback form ( http://thebuggenie.com/feedback.php ).