Ichiraku is up – now powered by Invision Power Board 3

Ichiraku is back up:

http://ichiraku.org/forums/

Please update your bookmarks, and tell everyone about it!

Ichiraku is back up!

Finally, after three days, Ichiraku is back again, only with a minor caveat. Full public release from the administrators:

Hello everyone,

It’s a big day for us as Ichiraku is finally back after being down for three days since August 7!

We are still looking for the probable cause of the problem and we are currently engaged in a manhunt, of sorts, to pinpoint the culprit. While the initial diagnosis was a hack case, we figured that the problem was too selective to have been due to a single person with malicious intent. This is due to Ichiraku’s SMF files removed from the server, while the rest were not.

We worked around this problem by reinstalling SMF and calling back a server backup made on 9:00am (GMT +8) of August 5th thus having a roll-back. All posts made on the day of August 6 will be lost, but I’d daresay this is better than restarting and rebooting all over again. We have also returned the Ichiraku Mail service (www.mail.ichiraku.org) last night, and assigned a new URL to Ichiraku DEV (http://support.ichiraku.org), although, alternatively, you can still access our support blog at its old address.

For the meantime, I and akee ask everyone to be very vigilant. Since this may not be the last time we see this – I will not give you false guarantees, because it MIGHT, and I want everyone to be with us as we fight these glitches or errors – please tell us as soon as you can. Meanwhile, I and your faithful staff will do we all we can to further safeguard our community from pernicious attacks, human or otherwise, in the future.

Thank you everyone for your continued support!
The Ichiraku Admin Team

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Enjoy everyone! And a little thank-you note wouldn’t hurt at all.

RC1.2 security update for Ichiraku (16 July 2009); board reorganizations

Hi all,
We have recently updated to SMF 2.0 RC1.2 which patches security holes in the previous version of RC1-1. If you have problems, or you are encountering issues, you can post in this thread: http://ichiraku.org/index.php?topic=2706.0

Currently the issues that we have are the buttons for “Forum” and “Blogs” are not visible in the menu bar, but we are at work fixing this as of this writing (it may have been overwritten by the update). For the meantime, you can use THIS LINK to access the board index. Take note that even though you cannot see the “Forum” and the “Blogs” button, you can still access them. Some of our notable modifications, which include the Activity Bar (aka “Posting Power”), has also been removed temporarily pending the developer’s update to RC1.2.

In other news we have reorganized our boards in the first part of what may well be a series of restructuring to make our forums more organized and more intuitive. We have placed The Plug Socket inside the Random board, which have been moved to the Dessert category in keeping with its traditional location. Future board reorganizations may concern the fate of The Logbook and the Random boards, and perhaps even The Lounge board.

Thank you,

Ichiraku DEV

Some board updates and Production Team disbanding

Hello all!

The Production Team member group is now disabled for the meantime, for security reasons. The administrators have decided that it would be a seasonal privilege for willing volunteers, unlike before that we choose which members would get the privilege. The Production Team is a regular member group that has access to the staff-only Forbidden Scroll, where we would ask for their ideas during community-wide events and major changes. Keep yourself updated on when the Production Team is open again, so you can volunteer if you’re interested.

We have added a new child board to the Switchboard section, “Chismax Central”, for showbiz news, or news related to famous personalities and icons to categorize news items. We have also added read-only Archives for the Boys’ and Girl’s Clubs.

The Boot Camp has been streamlined as the central discussion board of the clans, while the parent board of the Ichiraku Clans & Clubs will be for clan recruitment.

See you on the next update!

Group membership requests are now active!

Hello again,

I am pleased to announce that the group requests for memberships are now online and good to go! We are currently placing the Artists’ League and Writers’ Coven under groups available for request but with certain limitations, and the VIP group (Adult Zone) as a fully-requestable member group. The Boys’ Club and the Girls’ Club will also be made available for public request once we have chosen the group leaders assigned to each. In line with this, the request thread for membership into the VIP, and in the future the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs, will no longer be available as we will be moving all group membership requests into this new feature.

So how exactly do you request membership to a group? A tutorial using Ichiraku’s test account:

Step 1: Go to your profile page.

STEP 1: Start by clicking your profile page at the forum menu bar. Once you’ve clicked the “Profile” link, you will be taken to your SMF 2 profile page, as you can see in the image. Hover your mouse over the Modify Profile Tab and click the Group Membership option.

Step 2: Select the group/s you wish to join.

STEP 2: You will then be taken to the groups you are currently enrolled in, and below that the groups that are available for request in your current account. Select which group/s you wish to join and click “Request Membership”.

Step 3: Tell the group leader your reason that he/she should accept your request.

STEP 3: With that done, you will be taken to a short message box where you can type the reason to the group leader of your request and application. Make sure you type clearly. When you’re done click submit request.

After this the group leader in charge of the group you’ve requested will see a request from you, and will then make appropriate judgment on whether or not you deserve to be accepted into their group.

We will also be extending the functionality of this to other Ichiraku clans, official or not, in the future. Furthermore, group leaders will not necessarily be moderators, except for the Boys’ and Girls’ Club group leaders who will also act in the capacity of moderators. All group leaders however get access to an exclusive board along with other group leaders.

See you in your new groups, everyone!

June 24 new updates

Hi everyone,

As the new Ichiraku is now more or less stable, we have proceeded on fixing the underlying issues in the forum, and attempting to return the useful features in the old version of 1.1.9 to our latest one. While most of these have already been addressed, some are still pending and we would like to ask for your patience as we try ways on solving the problems. As it is, the Karma and Referrals systems are both down. We have decided to reset everyone’s Karma to zero due to people spamming the Karma system with smites and making it a vehicle for personal vendetta. However, we have found that there are no compatible plugins for the Karma Log with which we can keep track of Karma changes, so we have instead disabled it completely.

One of the replacements we were thinking of was the Good Post/Bad Post scheme. In this system, users are forced to make substantial posts and informative topics by making all of their posts susceptible to a voting system as either a “good post” or a “bad post”. The number of votes regardless of being good or bad affects their overall “Respect” points, enabling them to have some additional privileges from us. In addition, a post with at least 5 Bad Post votes will automatically be highlighted and marked, so that members will know information that is incorrect, misleading, or offensive.

Good Post/Bad Post in action

In theory, this has already been applied, but other members I believe don’t see this yet. So for the meantime, we will coordinate with the creator of this modification to see how it can be applied to our forum in a seamless manner.

There were also some complaints before that the user profile area when you’re viewing messages inside a topic – this area contains your badges, your avatar, custom title and the like, to the left of the message – is getting cluttered with the forum forcing to display a post-count based rank (Silberkreuzen, Cataphracti, Wardbearer, etc) along with your other text. We have hidden this in response, but left it for other members whose primary member group is those ranks based on post-counts. So if you guys see your user area panel in message view missing a post-count rank, don’t be alarmed; this only means that your primary membergroup is your topmost badge.

We have also restricted signature images to 2 now. Try to test if you can upload images more than this number to see if the feature (new to SMF 2) is working as advertised.

See you next update!