100 days…

@SuperbattleshipYamato well it was alot different back when we allowed Politics to flourish. Mary and Jennifer used to get into great battles, then we had Sexual Harassment Panda, Mr. Smith, et al who posted like 30 times a day. I recall about 3 others who were nasty but eventually drifted off under a rock.

Thanks for calling that out, I missed it. Most of the changes I mentioned are for www side of the site, which helps funnel new people into the forums.

Thanks for the suggestions!

@CentralCommando said in Celebrating 25 Years:

@djensen All of them seem interesting, as long as you get AI summaries to work properly, Apple sort of made that feature look bad. Here are some ideas to consider:

I’ll be using something more like ChatGPT.

Dynamic Forum Icons: Many Icons on the forums are just speech bubbles, which takes away some of the identity of the games. Instead, you could have each icon sort of represent the games. (North Africa could have a silhouette of Libya and Egypt, Anniversary could have a 25th or 40th, etc.)

I can work on that. I’m not a graphic designer so it’s a little more difficult for me to get it just right. GenAI is okay at monochromatic vector art but not quite there yet.

“Pinned” Categories: What I mean by this is that users can right-click categories and “pin” them to the top of the forum page. The reason why the pinning is air quoted is because it would only show up on that users end (If I “pinned” a category, only I could see it).

That sounds like a functionality request for NodeBB. It would be fairly core so I’m not sure I can write a plugin to do this.

Themes: While it could just be light and dark mode, I think it would be cool to have ones based off of Axis and Allies games. For example, 1984 Classic would have almost like that 80s paint style, 1914 could have the gradient of the map over a tan background and have trenches and gas masks at the bottom. This is just another thing that would add flavor.

Themes can be difficult to maintain. I’m actually considering moving to the new default “look and feel” of NodeBB soon. I’ll have to re-theme that with the colors I would prefer so I’ll take a look at making multiple themes.

I hope you consider these additions!

So, I think I’m going to push this out another several months. To celebrate 25, I think I just want to get back into the swing of things. Maybe do a giveaway. Go to a bunch of events. And play lot’s of A&A. Be more active here.

It may be an open secret but I just don’t play a ton of A&A these days.

However, I really, really enjoyed playtesting Stalingrad last Fall. I played som D-Day with @The_Good_Captain recently. Two games in a row; first one he shut me out. Second one was closer but he won hands down. Despite the loss, it was awesome. The next day @rmorel and I played Anniversary edition with Dale (not sue if he’s here), my dice were on fire but even if they were not; it was a great time.

I’m going to do more of that. Work on the website. Run an event at GenCon, etc.

@barnee Thanks, it worked

@superbattleshipyamato “Politics is a can of worms and causes more problems than it solves”-Plato

I agree with MrMalachiCrunch 100% as usual.

Yea, and it’s still in the shop too.

Here’s the sit (pronounced “sitch”)

I run off a laptop all the time.  A 90 watt power supply uses significantly less power than a 600 watt power supply, especially if you leave your machine on 24/7 like I do. (Yes, I know, the damage from power up/power down is no longer significant like it was in the late 80’s and the old 8086 processors (80386 DX, 80486, etc)).

There is a lot of construction going on in my neighborhood atm.  The home owner’s association decided to reside and reroof all the units, so as you can imagine, the air is about as polluted as the air in Bejing China atm!

The system fan (that would be the big fan in the unit, not the heat sink/fan on the processor) got clogged with debris and the brushes (the things that make the fan blades move) wore out so the fan does not blow anymore.  Thus, the system builds up heat (despite the external cooling pad I had under it) and shuts down to prevent damage to the processor.

The unit is under warranty still, but since it is a laptop, they cannot just send me a fan to pop in there.  They have to remove the hard drives and RAM and put them into a completely new enclosure (yay me) which of course means a complete format and reload of the software (yay me again) before they can send it back.

So that’s what’s goin on.  (Yay me.)  So I get to sit in a library and try to get posts in every so often (yay me) but I have not disappeared!

I have canceled all my competition games at AAMC because there are time limits and new rounds of the tourney have to start, etc.  I’m confident that league games I have here will be fine to continue, since we technically have until at least December 1st to complete or get close to completion for the year.

I do ask that if it has been a few days (ie a week) and I have not posted, or you see I posted somewhere but not in your game, you bump it because by the time I get back, there are 13+ pages of new posts to go through and I sometimes miss games.

Thanks