Tweaks & Changes (2026-09-20)

[James G.]

Here's some more updates on what's been going on lately, over the past few days.

Zeroth, we got some new star icons in the other day, to replace the old boxes. The member stars, as I said, are the nicest I've ever done. The staff stars may yet need some work.

First, I added a few new boards. Some of these may have actually gotten in before yesterday, but they're being mentioned now. This includes Random Access, the Game Board, and a number of hidden staff boards.

Second, there's now a new set of community principles and rules, stickied in this board. These may need to be tweaked as we go forward, but I hope it will be good enough to start out with.

Third, I've added a number of modifications which I expect will improve the user experience. Some of the more substantial ones include:
Details: You can now hide text or images in something like spoiler tags. This code can be accessed with the black triangle in the post editor, like so:

This is not a spoiler Expand...

But it does have hidden text inside!

Scrolling Buttons: There are a couple of buttons on the bottom-right side of the screen to help with moving up and down the page quickly. My early tests suggest that these may need adjusted, but it's a start.
Staff Page: There's now a link showing everyone who is currently on the staff.
Links: This is intended to help store hyperlinks to other websites. The idea here is that Snow Castles would be something of a 'web portal' and the links would all be to websites that are approved according to Snow Castles standards. Of course, this takes some doing, both to meet the standard and to make sure that the site stays that way, but we will see how it works. I don't think this is publicly usable yet, but it is installed and I hope to fully roll it out soon.

There are also a variety of backend mods intended to help improve site formatting, crack down on bots, or do other things that should not directly impact users' experience. One of those includes a mod to restrict double-posting; members should no longer be able to double-post until about a week has passed. The old rules, which restricted this by fiat, will be updated as soon as is practicable to note that this is now a preset limit, though we will still have a restriction on repeatedly bumping dead topics.

Thanks for reading and for your participation in what we're trying to build here. Feel free to comment on how we're doing in the response thread.