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!

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

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!