New features: Auto-save posts, new banner system, improved sign-up, and more!

I figured I would give everyone another update on some additional improvements made on EntropiaPlanets during the last few days.

Auto-Save
First and foremost, something I am sure everyone can appreciate. Have you ever started typing a massive message, only to find that when you click "Create" or "Send" that you somehow end up with an error? And of course you forgot to save your message.

Well, you will no longer have that problem on EP, as posts that have not been finished will be stored in a cookie on your computer, making sure you will not be losing them again. I tested this recently to ensure things were working by starting to type a message, and then closing my browser. When I navigated back to the same spot I was at before, my typed message from earlier reappeared!

I hope you will find this as useful as I think it is. I have experienced the issue quite a few times myself, and always end up with a post far less eloquent or extensive as I had the first time. Good riddance to that!

Sexy Signup!
We added a nicer sign-up option, by the way. For quite some time we had a default looking text-box prompting guests to either login or sign up, but that has now been replaced by a slick looking graphical system:

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It visually matches the slider module we have on the front-page, which we feel is modern and just sexy looking. This new message hopefully will entice more people to sign up for EP. And if not, it still looks awesome, anyway!

Sidebar everywhere
I also added the sidebar to be shown everywhere across the forum now. While I did not mind having some extra space available in parts of the forums, I kept finding myself looking for specific functionality typically exposed by the sidebar, and having to leave the current screen because of it. The sidebar now is consistently shown across the front-page, forum lists, and threads.

Advertise on EntropiaPlanets!
We recently purchased an Ad Management system built specifically for XenForo, and have been using it to serve Ad-Sense ads to guests. Today, however, I replaced the banner-serving system with the new version of this ad manager, in order to ensure we use a single system for all EP advertising. This will not mean much of a change to end-users, but might be nice in case you happen to have a service or site you want to advertise to any of the thousands of visitors EntropiaPlanets draws on a daily basis.

I tested the system in Chrome and FireFox, where the banners seemed to be perfectly placed (after some tweaking), but have seen some issues in Internet Explorer. I hope to be able to find a proper solution for that some time soon.


As EntropiaPlanets is always looking to support community efforts, we will soon be adding a new partnership deal where we can offer a link exchange program with your own site. However, if you would like to also do a banner exchange or just see if there are other ways to expose your services, shoot me a PM.

Using the Ad Manager system mentioned above, and the additional sidebar exposure, we will now also be offering premium advertisement space in the sidebar. The ads can be sized 250 * 250, and they will be sold exclusively. Because we do not want the sidebar to end up cluttered with ads, we will limit the amount of Ads there to a maximum of 3, and sell them on a monthly or yearly basis. We will try and ensure the quality of the ads that actually are implemented will be high, and that they are limited to serious Entropia-related services only.

In case you are interested in bringing your planet or services under a broader attention, and have them displayed next to the actual content, also feel free to send me a PM.


That about wraps up this summary of how EntropiaPlanets is constantly working to ensure we offer you the latest, most modern and useful features, and we're not done yet! To be continued.

 

It should not have. Can you name an example of where you should have gotten a notification but did not get one?

 

Odd. I have seen something similar on XenForo.com, and assumed it's because i checked a thread an "n" amount of times without replying in it. If you have additional examples, or we can smoehow pinpoint it to some specific repeatable steps, I might be able to put in a ticket asking what's up :)

 

What about others? Should the sidebar dissappear from the threads again, or should it stay? I'm more than open for suggestions and/or comments :)

 

Fixed. It seems we had an unclosed center tag in there somewhere.

 

I doubt it. The text that is stored is stored in a cookie on your local computer. It's not able to store images not committed to the database yet (the smileys ARE committed to the database, in which case it just needs to remember the link and BB Code to them).