Registrations are fixed; Ichiraku’s RACE TO 100,000 contest

Hi everyone,

I’m pleased to announce that we have made a work-around on the defective visual verification system of SMF 2 RC1.2. The CAPTCHA has been disabled and we are using a mod instead to verify a bot or a human registration. So what are you waiting for? Register now!

In other news, we have also launched the RACE TO 100,000 contest in celebration of the most active Ichiraku ever in our four years of existence as a community. This event is a race to reach the 100,000th post first; an exclusive Ichiraku prize will be given away for the winner!

Please consult THIS LINK for more information.

Thank you!

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!

New moderators and updates; the Ichiraku Blog beta

Ichiraku congratulates Poldo and kittikai for being our new moderators for the Boys’ and Girls’ Club respectively! They have secured an overwhelming landslide victory against their competitors with the votes of their constituents in their clubs.

Poldo got 8 votes out of 13 with 2 other candidates, while kittikai got 9 out of 11 votes with 1 other candidate.

They have already begun their improvement plans within their own community, so if you aren’t member of either yet, you can now request membership as long as you have the required minimum of 100 posts.

In other news, we have revised the Animation and Manga & Comics boards. General discussion are now in the parent board, while series discussions are separated to Ongoing and Concluded child boards. This is to further organize these very popular boards and make searching and posting topics a chore, unlike before. Their descriptions have also been updated, and the Boot Camp board for Clan Founders are now open.

We have also launched the beta of the Ichiraku Blog by zCommunity a couple of days ago. It’s a modification that adds a blogging community functionality for the members right in the forum itself. However, since it’s still in beta stage, we are keeping in touch with its developers regarding possible bugs, one of which are the bugs for the Moderator group that prevents them from using the Blog. They can make one, even an article, but they cannot access it afterward. It seems the error is in the Subs.php file of zCommunity, which also occasionally conflicts with the Whos.php (which serves the Who’s Online list in the board index) file of SMF. According to zCommunity, this might be an incompatibility issue with SMF 2.0 RC1-1 (the first RC ran fine), so they are going to look into it.

The Ichiraku Blog can be accessed by anyone, but only Premium Members and the staff are able to make and write blogs for themselves. If you are interested, you might want to look into our Premium Membership offer.

Till the next update!

July 03 new updates!

Sup dawg(s),

We have made some new updates on the functionality of Ichiraku this July 3. Since they’re quite too numerous to explain one by one, let us give you a summary of what they are:

1.) Search Dropdown Enhancement – When viewing a board or a topic, the search field in the upper right (on the forum header) will have a dropdown list. If you are viewing a board, the options on the dropdown list will enable you to search either the board you’re viewing or the entire forum. On the other hand, if you’re viewing a single topic, the dropdown list will enable you to search the topic, the board where the topic is located, or the entire forum.

2.) Good Post/Bad Post is now active – The new reputation system is now active for all members! Take note that pending a rule for the Good Post/Bad Post, you can only use this ability a maximum of five times per hour, regardless of up or down votes.

3.) Added Topic Note and Ignore Board ability to Premium Members – Topic Notes are a sort of update on the topic, which is especially useful if the nature of the thread is volatile and changing (example of this are polls). This way, the thread starter can announce what is happening on the thread to outsiders or visitors of the topic. New Topic Notes are indicated by a yellow triangle beside the topic when viewing the contents of a board. Ignoring Boards meanwhile disables the forum updating you of ignored boards’ new posts/new topics when looking at Unread Posts or Recent Posts. You can choose which board to ignore by going to your Profile > Modify Profile > Ignore Boards Options. The Introductions Board, the Birthdays board and the News & Announcements board cannot be ignored.

4.) Topic Starter Icon – A simple way to determine the person who made the topic. A pencil icon will appear beside the user’s name during topic view.

5.) Premium Membership Promo – revamped the Premium Membership payment scheme and announced the Premium Promo, adding new privileges to the Premium member group. Check the News & Announcements section for details. The Red Carpet exclusive board for Premium members is also now online.

6.) Redirecting Board for Ichiraku DEV – Ichiraku DEV now features its own link in the style of a redirecting board above the board index.

7.) Activity Bar aka Posting Power – An activity gauge is now also featured to keep track of active members. It counts all posts made within the last 30 days and matches it against the 500-post goal (100%).

8.) Board Notes – There are admin-enabled announcements for boards that may contain notices or warnings on the contents of that board, visible to all. As of this writing, only the Premium-exclusive board The Red Carpet contains such a board note.

9.) Updated permissions for existing member groups – Member groups now have updated permissions and privileges that were otherwise overlooked in the old version of the forum.

10.) SimplePortal Article announcements visible in boards – Articles that will contain announcements from the Ichiraku staff as an improvised version of  Global Forum Announcement. The Article/s will be clickable to the original announcement made at the News & Announcements board.

Future updates will cover the referral mod and a way for us to keep track of the voting system in the Good Post/Bad Post modification. We’ll also hopefully include new trial features that existing Premium members will get to test soon.

Thank you from your continued belief in us!

New affiliate!

Hi guys,

I am proud to announce that we have reached a final round of talks with another online anime community, Anime Elites. As proof of our affiliation, we have exchanged a standard 500×80 banner with them, and we have added their banner to appear in our ad rotator just above the news fader.

The Anime Elites banner as it would appear on the forum index

This is part of our commitment to globalize and link our communities together.

You can visit their site HERE.

Cheers,

Ichiraku DEV

First bug encountered on SMF 2.0 (Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome only)

Hello everyone,

As you may well know, SMF 2.0 is still in its pre-release stage, as the current version installed on Ichiraku is Release Candidate 1.1. As it’s not the final release yet, we are expecting some bugs to crop up once in a while, so we are very, very critical of the system’s performance and are always on the lookout for issues that may manifest as users utilize it for their purposes.

A somewhat frustrating bug has appeared for users of Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome (we have tested it on Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 9.6 without any error, so if you are users of these browsers, this issue does not concern you). This is a rather annoying problem to users of the SMF Rich Editor, commonly called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). This is a new feature of SMF 2 that enables users not familiar with BBCode like [img] or [b] to format their posts and see in real-time, within the posting window, what their posts would look like when submitted. However, a problem with the coding, as described in this article, there is an acknowledged bug in SMF 2.0 that will be addressed in the second Release Candidate of SMF 2. To quote:

The new lines thing is a bug in Webkit.

Webkit wraps lines in iframes in <divs>

To see the entire article, click THIS.

Basically, what happens is that when you try to format an entire post with several line breaks, SMF’s WYSIWYG editor automatically cuts the line breaks from them and jams them all together in one big paragraph.

We have already submitted a report to the developers regarding this issue.

A few images of the problem using Firefox:

Test message using single line of text.

As you can see here, you can format your text with as many combinations of style as you can think of, and it would appear as nice as it appears in the window AS LONG AS THERE IS NO LINE BREAK. However, when line breaks are involved, this:

Test message, with several line breaks

You will see that all line breaks were removed, and that there was an additional [/] after your text.

We have found however that you can actually work around this issue by inputting one whole block of text, formatting them, and then dividing them into paragraphs. The problem seems to be triggered by typing several paragraphs then formatting them afterward.

Again we are working with the SMF developers to fix this issue, so until the issue is fixed, bear with us. Otherwise, use Opera or Internet Explorer for the meantime if you want to use the WYSIWYG editor without complications, or manually format your posts using BBCode or using WYSIWYG one line at a time.

Cheers,

Ichiraku DEV

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!