Cipher

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve been enjoying Issue 27, Page 3 and had a great Thanksgiving! 🦃 So you’re aware - we’ll be moving the next donation window to Saturday, December 18th, and suspending non-critical support from December 23rd through December 27th to give our volunteer GM team a much deserved break for the Holiday. During this time, we will be focused on critical and time-sensitive issues and you should expect longer-than-usual response times. We appreciate your patience and understanding. As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. Last Month: November 2021 Last month we accepted $5,740.46 in donations, $9.91 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month. As expected, OVH billed us pro-rata for the new SCALE-3 servers. This totalled $394.06 and aligns the billing of these new servers with the rest of our services. Here is the breakdown of what November’s funds went towards: $4,094.46 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $394.06 billed pro-rata for the two newer servers, covered in December $300.00 to renew our annual DocuSign subscription Early renewal, included in November’s target Billed last month, see previous post $137.76 for two domain renewals from Namecheap Early renewal, included in November’s target Billed last month, see previous post $121.28 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $19.84 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email $9.73 for security / administration software This Month: December 2021 We brought the new SCALE-3 servers online and have cancelled the older servers that they are replacing. As such, starting this month, we will no longer be billed for them. For more information about these changes, please see this thread. The donation target for December 2021 is $4,721.79. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,057.47 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $394.06 to cover the pro-rata invoice from November $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $105.00 for our 6-month Invision Community renewal $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $4,721.79 and will automatically close once that target is met. - The Homecoming Team

The reputation stat on posts was actually removed in Invision 4.6.x which we upgraded to last week. The reputation view that you see on posts now, in the desktop client anyways, is actually re-introduced through our custom forum theme, and was not re-added to the mobile theme because of other changes made there and lack of space in the current design.

The policy of not disclosing actions taken against other players is to protect the privacy of our player base and to avoid introducing or worsening patterns of harassment that you often see within online games, including things like 'report brigading'. You should also understand that many times, our GMs have to do further investigation and take a wider perspective into consideration when making their judgement; and often times, this will include factors that you may not have been aware of when making the report. Things are seldom as simple as dealing with a name like "xXxRacistNamexXx". Yes, this policy is not without downsides - one of which being that players can sometimes feel like their reports are being unheard or ignored, but we ask that the community have faith that our team is reading through every report we receive and taking appropriate action where necessary. Please utilize the report / petition feature, and do not assume that your reports are unread or that other players have reported something that you've seen. When everyone views the system this way, it quickly leads to situations where things simply aren't reported, and then everyone assumes that we must have ignored the reports about it because nothing happened. In reality, in these situations, it was simply a matter of us having not received a report to begin with. As of the time of this post, our GM team has closed over 40,000 tickets -- over 40 tickets per day since Homecoming started in April 2019. These are a mix of various forms of support, and reports against other players, and in every case a GM manually reviewed the ticket, replied, and took any necessary actions.

I'm still interested in bringing it back in some capacity using badges from in-game, but no promises.

Thank you, I'll look into this as soon as I can 🙂

The Achievement systems (Ranks & Badges) were introduced by Invision in update 4.6.x which was included in a set of updates I applied to the forums overnight. I wasn't anticipating this system would be as divisive as it appears to be -- if someone wanted to attribute a form of 'status' based on forum metrics and use that as a basis for judgement, they could have done so through the existing Post Count and Reputation metrics available and displayed on each post already. That said - I understand where you're coming from with your feedback and it's clear that it's something we need to address. Perhaps the discussion we need to have is whether disabling the systems altogether is the right approach or if we can adapt the system to be something that more people are comfortable with. There has been a lot of positive feedback around the new systems as well, so finding a middle-ground that everyone (or at least the majority) are happy with is something we should work towards, if possible. Some of the changes I had already planned included swapping the names and art for the ranks and badges out for badges from the game itself, for example. For right now though, and until we figure out what we're going to do with it, I've gone ahead and disabled the systems. Let's try to keep this thread civil please 🙂 The ranking system is started from the day that the update is applied. Because of the way that the point system works, I do not believe it is viable to try and calculate these values retroactively -- and it seems that Invision came to the same conclusion. Badges, however, have a set of rules and triggers associated with them and will automatically be granted next time you interact with the feature related to that badge -- things like responding to threads, posting a new thread, etc. We will not be rolling back the updates. These updates included a number of other feature releases, bug fixes, and security patches. Additionally, pinning the forum software version would mean that we are unable to upgrade in the future and receive security patches for new vulnerabilities that are discovered. See above -- the badge system works on a set of rules and triggers, and badges that you qualify for will be automagically granted the next time that your interact with the system related to that badge. (Note that this no longer applies as the systems have been disabled; however if they are enabled again in the future, this will still apply). The All and None options there only apply if there are multiple options that can be applied to the thread. If you had moderator status, this would include things like pinning the topic, featuring it, etc. Since you only have one list option here, those links don't really do much.

What device are you experiencing this on? Feel free to DM me if that's preferable.

/title

Unfortunately it's not. We can specify a period of time where editing is allowed, after which it will be disabled; but adding a period of time where edits do not display the message will require additional custom application work in IPS and is a low priority for us at the moment.

Hello everyone! As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums. Last Month: October 2021 Last month we accepted $5,856.15 in donations, $4.43 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month. We went forward with two renewals (DocuSign & Namecheap) that were originally planned for November this month. The invoice totals for these renewals is included below for clarity when reviewing the PayPal screencap below, but will be included in November’s donation target still as they were not covered by the donation target for October. Here is the breakdown of what October’s funds went towards: $4,094.46 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $1,196.00 in setup fees for the two new SCALE-3 servers + $1,027.98 for the first month of service on the two new SCALE-3 servers This was higher than anticipated due to a billing change, and the difference will be included in November’s donation target for clarity $300.00 to renew our annual DocuSign subscription Early renewal, included in November’s target $137.76 for two domain renewals from Namecheap Early renewal, included in November’s target $121.45 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $19.24 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software This Month: November 2021 We received both of the additional SCALE-3 servers that we ordered this month as part of our ongoing mapserver host hardware changes. Unfortunately, though, delivery was late in the month and they were delivered with troublesome network adapters. As such, we were unable to migrate to them in time to cancel the older ADVANCE-5 servers, which we will be billed for again in November. Additionally, OVH charged us for a full month of service on these new servers up-front rather than billing pro-rata as they have in the past, leaving a difference of $641.55 to recover in November. The only other changes this month are that we have cancelled our Atlassian Jira account that was billing us $10/mo as we were not utilizing it, and we have identified the cause of the recent price increase on our Amazon AWS account and have made changes to reduce our AWS costs going forward. All of that said, the donation target for November 2021 is $5,730.55. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,094.46 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $641.55 to cover the remaining cost of the first month of service on the new SCALE-3 servers $300.00 for our annual DocuSign renewal $137.76 for two one-year domain renewals $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $5,730.55 and will automatically close once that target is met. As always, thank you for all of the support, and have a Happy Halloween! 👻 - The Homecoming Team

Hello everyone! As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums. Additionally, if you have Discord Nitro then please consider using a Nitro server boost on our public Discord server. Maintaining over 30 Nitro boosts gives all of our members new and enhanced features on the server including additional emojis, a higher upload limit, better voice chat quality, and our vanity URL. Click here to read more about Server Boosting. We greatly appreciate everyone who has put their Nitro boosts towards our Discord server! September 2021 Breakdown Last month we accepted $4,528.35 in donations, $49.83 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month. Here is the breakdown of what September’s funds went towards: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $428.33 charged separately for the SCALE-3 server that was delivered (this will be included in October’s target) $121.46 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $19.83 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email $15.00 to pay a 1-year domain renewal $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software October 2021 We received the first of three SCALE-3 servers last month and have been happy with the performance since bringing it into our live cluster. As such, we will be moving forward with our mapserver host hardware changes this month. Overall, here are the changes we’re going to be making this month: Two of our Advance-5 servers will be cancelled This will save us $710/mo going forward The remaining Advance-5 servers will be cancelled after the additional SCALE-3 servers are delivered Two additional SCALE-3 servers will be ordered These have a setup fee of $598 each, totalling $1,196 for this month The current delivery estimate for these is 30 days, but we’re anticipating it taking longer, based on the time it took to deliver the last SCALE-3 We will not be billed monthly for these until they are delivered and online The donation target for October 2021 is $5,851.75. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,094.46 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $1,196 to cover setup fees for the two additional SCALE-3 servers + $386.43 to cover the pro rata billing in September for the first SCALE-3 This was partially covered by the $49.83 in donations over our target last month $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $5,851.75 and will automatically close once that target is met. As always, thank you for all of the support! - The Homecoming Team

Hello everyone! As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums. Additionally, if you have Discord Nitro then please consider using a Nitro server boost on our public Discord server. Maintaining over 30 Nitro boosts gives all of our members new and enhanced features on the server including additional emojis, a higher upload limit, better voice chat quality, and our vanity URL. Click here to read more about Server Boosting. We greatly appreciate everyone who has put their Nitro boosts towards our Discord server! August 2021 Breakdown Last month we accepted $4,576.78 in donations, $16.27 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month. Here is the breakdown of what August's funds went towards: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $9.00 for 3 additional IPv4 addresses $121.46 for our Google G-Suite services $95.20 to renew a few of our domains for 1 year (Namecheap) $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $15.00 to renew another domain for 1 year (1&1 IONOS) $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $10.00 to renew some of our web assets from IPSFocus $9.73 for security / administration software $19.83 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email September 2021 The donation target for the upcoming month may shift slightly as the SCALE-3 server we ordered a few months ago has finally been delivered by OVH and billing for this service will begin soon. The additional charge for this server, if any, will likely be included in next month’s target. The donation target for September 2021 is $4,478.52. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $4,478.52 and will automatically close once that target is met. As always, thank you for all of the support! - The Homecoming Team

Hello everyone! Quick reminder that we'll be hosting the official Summer Costume Contest today! More information is available here. As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums. Additionally, if you have Discord Nitro then please consider using a Nitro server boost on our public Discord server. Maintaining over 30 Nitro boosts gives all of our members new and enhanced features on the server including additional emojis, a higher upload limit, better voice chat quality, and our vanity URL. Click here to read more about Server Boosting. We’re currently at 37 boosts and will lose our Level 3 perks if we drop below 30 for more than a few days. We greatly appreciate everyone who has put their Nitro boosts towards our Discord server! July 2021 Breakdown Last month we accepted $4,367.35 in donations, $13.86 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month. Here is the breakdown of what June’s funds went towards: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $7.99 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email August 2021 The donation target for August 2021 is $4,560.51. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $110.20 for 4 1-year domain renewals $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $4,560.51 and will automatically close once that target is met. As always, thank you for all of the support! - The Homecoming Team

Hello everyone! As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums. Additionally, if you have Discord Nitro then please consider using a Nitro server boost on our public Discord server. Maintaining over 30 Nitro boosts gives all of our members new and enhanced features on the server including additional emojis, a higher upload limit, better voice chat quality, and our vanity URL. Click here to read more about Server Boosting. We’re currently at 44 boosts and will lose our Level 3 perks if we drop below 30 for more than a few days. We greatly appreciate everyone who has put their Nitro boosts towards our Discord server! June 2021 Last month we accepted $8,175.22 in donations, $114.77 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month. Note that $1,677.14 went towards covering the initial order and setup cost for the new SCALE-2 server ordered in May and is not included in the breakdown below. Here is the breakdown of what June’s funds went towards: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $1,823.00 to pay our latest legal invoice $121.58 for our Google G-Suite services $75.00 to renew our forum software license $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $20.00 to recharge our Twilio balance $10.00 for a domain renewal $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email July 2021 The donation target for July 2021 is $4,353.49. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $4,353.49 and will automatically close once that target is met. As always, thank you for all of the support! - The Homecoming Team

We haven't heard anything back from OVH yet, and tests performed about 30 minutes ago show that the problem is still occurring. We'll provide updates when available via the forums and our Discord.

Data is completely intact and we make regular backups both on and off site, so no worries there! This is purely a networking issue across the private VLAN our servers rely on.

Hey all, Unfortunately this one is a bit out of our control. At around 1 AM UTC, we started experiencing severe packet loss and fluctuating latency across the private network (vRack) that our servers use to communicate. We've since put a support ticket in with OVH and have attempted to call anyone we could get ahold of at OVH to have this issue investigated. Bad news is, though, their automated response system is currently rejecting calls to all departments (incl. incident & outage reporting, technical support, and account & billing), so we're unable to obtain any more information at this time. We're hoping to get a response to our support ticket soon or have the issue resolve itself. We appreciate your patience!

I actually quite like this idea! I won't make any promises, but a torch reaction might pop up in the near future. Thanks for the suggestion 🙂

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I've gone ahead and filed a false positive report with Avast which should hopefully get this problem resolved within a few days. Fortunately, and rather strangely, none of our domains are actually coming up on any blacklists or show as being flagged by any commercial anti-virus programs (tested through a few services incl. VirusTotal). I'm assuming that Avast flagging the site is too recent to show up on these services, so hopefully it'll just be one false positive report and we're good to go.

Hello everyone! Our donation target will be a bit higher for the next few months as we work on updating our infrastructure around new hosting plans available from OVH. For more information, please check out this great post by Telephone which covers all of the details in great depth. TL;DR - we’re hoping to reduce our overall monthly operating costs by nearly $600.00 in the near future! Now, as usual, a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread. We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums. Additionally, if you have Discord Nitro then please consider using a Nitro server boost on our public Discord server. Maintaining over 30 Nitro boosts gives all of our members new and enhanced features on the server including additional emojis, a higher upload limit, better voice chat quality, and our vanity URL. Click here to read more about Server Boosting. We’re currently at 37 boosts and will lose our Level 3 perks if we drop below 30 for more than a few days. We greatly appreciate everyone who has put their Nitro boosts towards our Discord server! May 2021 Breakdown Last month we accepted $4,968.76 in donations, $136.52 over our target for the month. The remainder was put towards additional expenses for the month, detailed below. Note that as the costs for May exceeded the donation target for the month, we will be including the remaining balance for the month in the June donation window. These payments were made from our contingency fund. Here is the breakdown of what May’s funds went towards: $4,645.44 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH + $1,111.99 to purchase and set up a new SCALE-2. For more information about this, please read this thread. $300.00 to pay our annual Delaware LLC franchise tax $240.00 to renew our UPS mailing address / box for 12 months $125.00 to renew our 12-month agreement with our Registered Agent $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $70.17 for domain renewals $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $10.00 for an Invision marketplace extension $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email June 2021 We have a few additional charges this month: An invoice from our primary law firm for their work done up to March 31st totalling $1,823.00 which we will be paying in early June $75 to renew our forum software for 6 months $20 to recharge our Twilio balance (we use this for programmable SMS for centralized 2fa) Overall, the donation target for June 2021 is $8,060.45. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated: $4,290.45 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH $1,823.00 for the latest legal invoice $1,677.14 to cover the additional charges from may $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services $75.00 to renew our forum software $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace $20.00 to recharge our Twilio balance for programmable SMS $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service $9.73 for security / administration software $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $8,060.45 and will automatically close once that target is met. As always, thank you for all of the support! - The Homecoming Team

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Since you mentioned using Firefox: Press Ctrl + Shift + S and click Save full page in the top-right. This will allow you to save a properly rendered full snapshot of the page as an image which you can then print. It's not perfect and you can only do one page at a time, but unfortunately there aren't many options for this otherwise at this time. Edit: For better contrast / less colour, you can switch to the default theme at the bottom of the page:

Oops! Seems mobile was an oversight when we were pushing the change to the CoC page. We'll get this fixed up soon. Thank you! Edit: Fixed!

This should be just fine as long as the content abides by the Code of Conduct and video policy therein!

That is correct as long as the content / platform abides by the Code of Conduct (and the video policy therein).