Some new features and small improvements

Some new features and small improvements

bart's picture

Yesterday was kind of a big day for OGA development, essentially the last major feature push before 2.0.  You won't see any earth-shattering differences, but you might notice that things are a little bit nicer.  Here's what we did:

  • Souped up the "active forum topics" block so that the title links to the forums, and the forum name is listed along with the forum post.
  • Replaced the image captcha with a much less annoying custom text captcha.  It's not likely that bots will be able to break it, as it would require custom code for specifically beating OGA's captcha, and I don't think we're big enough to warrant the effort.  I'm sure the occasional human spammer will still manage to get in, but this should at least stop the bots that can defeat ReCaptcha.
  • Fixed preview images on the front page and search pages so that they're really 120x90 instead of 640x480 and scaled down.  This should make the front page load a lot faster and cut our bandwidth consumption down somewhat.

I'd also like to call your attention (particularly visiting artists) to the Open Commissions Forum, where we post art bounties.  As of this posting, we're offering $30 for a fairly simple 3D animation (the model you'll be animating is already created, and it can probably be done with a Blender particle system).  If you're a game project lead and you'd like to commission art directly, you can feel free to post an offer on the forum.  If you're an artist who is open for commissions, post there and let us know.

I mentioned this yesterday as well, but here's a reminder:  If you're an expert on any of the areas that we've created new forums for, comment here and let us know.  We'd love to get some new forum maintainers.  It's a great way to participate in OGA if you're looking to do that. :)