Crossfire 3: Changelog

Now that you have feasted your eyes upon Crossfire 3, let me tell you what there is to know about the new features of Crossfire 3:

General:

- New design. Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few days, you'll have noticed it by now. We currently do not support personal skin settings, although we may allow for this in the future. Send your kudos to Angrykid, foonr, taLa who have all played a role in the evolution from the first new design to this one. Special thanks go out to BobbyDigital from Newcastle United for creating the kick-ass banner !

- Overall security improvements. This has been one of the main reasons for the development of Crossfire 3. You will notice that you will be asked to confirm actions such as deleting content, adding and removing buddies, entering in CrossFight, etc. These are made to force you to use POST data, so that simply following a link can no longer directly perform an operation such as adding a buddy, removing a buddy, etc in the way it was possible on Crossfire 2. All incoming POST data is checked for malicious content, and is secured to make sure all incoming POST data originates from Crossfire.

- Some new content types have been introduced, including Movies, Tutorials, Interviews.

- Introduction of the Sticky status. Many of the content types (except Journals) now allow for the Sticky status, in which case a post will be listed at the top, regardless of its posting date and time.

News:

The news now has two types: approved news and other news. Approved news items are those that will be listed on the main page. Other news is the waiting line for approved news: it holds news that is yet to be approved, or news that has been disapproved for the main page. This is to help ensure that only the news that is considered to really matter is displayed on the main page. This also serves as a safeguard against bogus news.

This implies that when you submit News, it will automatically go into the Other News section until approved by an admin.

Articles:

Articles have stayed very much the same, in the way that they are still following the traditional intro + pages format. Apart from a bugfix where entering more than 5 pages of content would break the article, nothing much has changed here.

Interviews:

Interviews is a new content type that is the twin brother of Columns. Previously, interviews were posted as columns simply because there was no specific section to place them in: now there is.

CrossFight:

foonr (sic) will provide you with a complete rundown of how the whole CrossFight tournament will take place once the time has come to introduce it. He intends to first run a cup to determine the starting teams in the CrossFight grid. Once those teams have been determined, CrossFight will go live and a detailed explanation will be provided.

GamesTV.org Feed:

Crossfire now offers a live feed from GamesTV.org, that will list the 4 most recently upcoming Enemy Territory matches. This feed will auto-update every 10 minutes. It can be viewed in the left column, underneath the CrossFight section.

Clans:

Crossfire now has extensive clan support. Clans can have two types of members: Leaders and regular Members. Leaders are able to modify the clan's details, and manage the members in the clan (add, remove etc) by going to their clan profile, and using the admin box to select Manage. They can promote users to be Leader status, and can also demote Leaders to regular Members. A clan can have multiple leaders, in which case they all have the same power to demote and promote at will. Therefore, be careful who you assign as your clan leader(s).

Clans can be registered here. Be aware that clans are reviewed personally by the Crossfire admins, which means you won't get away with registering bogus clans. The clans you are in are listed under your profile, as well as whether you are a Leader or a Member of those clans.

Private Messages:[/b]

The PM listing page has been improved to allow for easier selection and deleting of messages. You are able to select All Messages, Service Messages ( those sent by Crossfire ), Unread Messages and Read Messages to easily delete only those that you want. Of course, you are still able to tick the checkboxes to indicate exactly which ones you want to delete in case none of the above presets suits your needs.

Also, the nested quotes and backslash annoyances will no longer happen. Nested quotes will be converted to a single quote, listing the text under eachother.

User profiles:

All of the info you could have on Crossfire 2 you can also have on Crossfire 3. Aside from that, several info fields have been added, such as the website field, the achievements box and a whole set of fields for your hardware info. The achievements box is meant to be used only to list achievements: that means plain text only. No UBB code tags will work in this field. That is, except for the [ 1st ], [ 2nd ] and [ 3rd ] tags, that in turn will not work anywhere outside the achievements box. So you needn't try to post comments with [ 1st ] in it on any post, because it will not work, it would be deleted anyway (and I will be tempted to ban you too).

Other than that, two notable settings are your Timezone and DST fields. I think the Timezone field is fairly obvious, although the DST setting may not be as clear. DST stands for Daylight Saving Time, more commonly referred to in Europe as Summer Time. This means that the time is moved forward from the official time, usually by one. If you are in an area that follows DST (DST is not followed everywhere), you must check this box.

Many people have complained that their Hits count is gone. Indeed, this is gone, and we don't intend to bring it back anytime soon. Not only that is gone, the latest comments and journals etc as they existed on Crossfire 2 have also gone. This is only temporarily, and these WILL be brought back to you soon.

Filters:

Filters work the same way as they did before; that means that you tick the checkboxes next to the content categories you do NOT want to see. Appearantly some people have been unable to grasp this, so I'll just say it again: the content categories you do NOT want to see. One exception to this rule: you cannot filter the Crossfire category. This to ensure that messages posted under the Crossfire category will be read by everyone.

Forums:

The forums have stayed pretty much the same. The forum listing allows for some sexy icons and some info about the last posting time. You are no longer able to delete forum posts you have made, to make sure we have a better grasp of what is going on.

UBB tags:

Some new tags have been introduced, namely these: irc, s/strike, 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Also, the hide tag is back in business.
In the Usage bits below, think out any spaces between the brackets.

irc:

Writes a direct link to an IRC channel, using the irc://network/channel syntax. This syntax is understood by as good as every modern browser, and will fire up your IRC client to join the channel. If no network is specified, quakenet is assumed.

Usage:

[ irc ] #channel [ / irc ]
[ irc=(freenode|quakenet|efnet) ] #channel [ / irc ]

Examples:

[ irc ] #crossfire [ /irc ] -> #crossfire
[ irc=freenode ] #freenodechannel [ /irc ] -> [irc=freenode]#freenodechannel

s or strike

The 's' and 'strike' tag are identical. They strikethrough the text inside the tag.

Usage:

[ s ] strike this [ /s ]

Example:

on strike !


RSS Feeds:

RSS feeds can now be found through this URL:

http://www.crossfire.nu/?x=rss&content=identifier

Where identifier can be one of the following:

news
othernews
articles
columns
journals
interviews
polls
movies
tutorials

If no content directive is given content=news is assumed.

Credits & Thanks:

taLa: for putting heart, soul, sweat, tears and lots of code into this site.
TosspoT: for coming up with the new ideas that will make your new Crossfire experience a refreshing one.
raza: for having come up with the original idea of Crossfire in the first place.
foonr: for providing anti-TosspoT propaganda in troubled times ;), and providing the base for the new design.
skooli & arni: for providing awesome technical support, advice and instructions.
Angrykid: for providing the original layout, ditching it to create the 'medieval castle' design that formed the root of what you are seeing now.
Fusen: for creating the data conversion routines from crossfire 2 to crossfire 3
BobbyDigital: for providing us with a superb new banner and other art work.
Ronner: for getting us hooked up with a kick-ass X3M-Servers machine, and for providing some JavaScript code.
BeyondThePixel: for providing graphical support and CSS additions

All the Crossfire admins: for making sure this community keeps running smoothly: Fusen, Ronner, raza, HellGoat, Angrykid, Nellie, Cash, foonr, Protex, crow, Monkd, sizah, Max, Rafiki, Loekino, Anaconda, taLa and last but definitely not least: TosspoT

All the people who beta tested this site: unfortunately I do not remember every single one of you, but you know who you are :D

Please direct all questions and comments to #crossfire at QuakeNet.