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We've been working on some technical updates recently. While everything has been extensively tested, we can't compete with an entire community of people posting around the clock, so we'd appreciate if you could keep an eye out for any bugs.
First on the list is a fix to our forum software's ajax API. You may have noticed that clicking some buttons on posts, such as the reputation button, didn't always work. We implemented a workaround some time ago, but it was imperfect, and problems still arose. Within the past week or so, we've released a series of updates to fix this properly. They seem to be working well.
We've cut down on a lot of the SSL/TLS warnings that users of old Internet Explorer versions were seeing. We can't eliminate these completely, but they should be significantly reduced. You can help by ensuring that images you embed in posts use the HTTPS protocol, rather than plain HTTP.
The billing system has had several minor bugs fixed. It's been thoroughly tested, and we've gone out of our way to exceed industry standard security practices. However, it still only works as well as your credit card; we have limited access to your information, so we can't troubleshoot payments for you. If your credit card is declined, you will need to contact your bank. We use all standard fraud checks that your bank makes available, so if you have entered inaccurate or incomplete information, your card may be declined--even if you can normally get away with it on other sites. Avoid entering values like "N/A" or "Not Applicable".
International users will be happy to know that we've rewritten parts of the BBcode engine to make it compatible with accented letters and other UTF-8 characters. Previously, UTF-8 wasn't handled properly, so non-Latin characters would result in various problems, from garbled text to truncated lines. While our site is still not fully UTF-8 compatible, we hope you'll find that posts and messages now permit a much wider range of text.
In other news
I want to take this chance to urge users of old, out-of-date browsers to update. Roughly 2% of our regulars use an old version of Internet Explorer, and have an update available for them via Windows Update. We expend a lot of resources--time and money--just to provide minimal compatibility for this 2%. We could be spending this time improving our site in more noticeable ways.
First on the list is a fix to our forum software's ajax API. You may have noticed that clicking some buttons on posts, such as the reputation button, didn't always work. We implemented a workaround some time ago, but it was imperfect, and problems still arose. Within the past week or so, we've released a series of updates to fix this properly. They seem to be working well.
We've cut down on a lot of the SSL/TLS warnings that users of old Internet Explorer versions were seeing. We can't eliminate these completely, but they should be significantly reduced. You can help by ensuring that images you embed in posts use the HTTPS protocol, rather than plain HTTP.
The billing system has had several minor bugs fixed. It's been thoroughly tested, and we've gone out of our way to exceed industry standard security practices. However, it still only works as well as your credit card; we have limited access to your information, so we can't troubleshoot payments for you. If your credit card is declined, you will need to contact your bank. We use all standard fraud checks that your bank makes available, so if you have entered inaccurate or incomplete information, your card may be declined--even if you can normally get away with it on other sites. Avoid entering values like "N/A" or "Not Applicable".
International users will be happy to know that we've rewritten parts of the BBcode engine to make it compatible with accented letters and other UTF-8 characters. Previously, UTF-8 wasn't handled properly, so non-Latin characters would result in various problems, from garbled text to truncated lines. While our site is still not fully UTF-8 compatible, we hope you'll find that posts and messages now permit a much wider range of text.
In other news
I want to take this chance to urge users of old, out-of-date browsers to update. Roughly 2% of our regulars use an old version of Internet Explorer, and have an update available for them via Windows Update. We expend a lot of resources--time and money--just to provide minimal compatibility for this 2%. We could be spending this time improving our site in more noticeable ways.
