Flipz

Zanna relaxes slightly, moving her hand off the hilt of her dagger as the meddling guards leave. She follows the man obediently, apparently content to let the Bruhalv and the Addok-zo handle the diplomacy.

"We have a job with the Mister Tweed," Zanna replies in her halting Common. "You will move."

Is there a way besides BBCode to type in custom colors (i.e. as defined by hex values), or are we just stuck with the predefined color palette unless we use BBCode? I don't mind using BBCode for custom colors (it's what I'm used to), it's just a little odd to have to use BBCode for that specifically when Invision is very clearly pushing super hard for us to use this rich-text editor, and it's awkward to have to use BBCode for color while trying to use the bold/italic/underline buttons for all the other formatting. Same question for spoilers, too; I assume it's just a matter of a button for spoilers not yet being added to the editor, but I thought I'd ask here in case I'm just a blind fool.

Zanna finally manages to clear her throat. "We still do not know what we are here to do. Will your...'boss'?...tell us?"

Zanna coughs a bit, a loud noise compared to her unusual silence along the rest of the journey. She clears her throat, but it's clear that something is wrong with her voice--perhaps a bit of trail rations stuck in her throat or the forum upgrade making it hard to figure out how do do her special voice color or some other such minor annoyance. She shrugs apologetically, and just casually stands waiting for orders.

I'm very interested in continuing. Part of the reason I'm so excited about my upcoming Quests is because of some of the info Sandy gave me all the way back in 104 on the Wolfgang; I've only seen small glimpses, but the information I do have has me excited for the chance to express Sandy's vision for the Wolfgang through the characters I'm using, through the series of Quests I have planned. In fact, on the subject of 104, one of my great joys in hosting that Quest was being able to introduce some of Sandy's ideas that Sandy himself had not yet had the chance to premiere. I think that with Sandy's help and permission, we very much can carry on some of that vision, if only we have the courage to ask. In fact, on the subject of upcoming Quests...how about a sneak preview?

I know I haven't commented on this despite the announcement before now, and honestly a lot of it's coming from not having the words to say. The time and effort and dedication you've had for this game over the years is nothing short of superhuman. I don't think I'm alone in saying that pretty much everything I've contributed to this game and its world, particularly in the field of QMing, has been an attempt to honor and live up to the legacy you've created, to try to come even remotely close to your standard of quality. I'm going to miss your guidance, your creativity, your devotion to detail. We're all going to miss it. Thank you. If there's anything I can do to help support what you've created, anything at all, just say the word. Your work is far too good to let it just disappear. In the meantime, enjoy your newfound freedom, and I hope that one day you'll be able to return, even if it's just once in a blue moon.

Well, while we're waiting for the site to recover...let's talk roleplaying! It's time for the super-amazing end card tournament Random Question of the Unspecified Time Period!!!! What is/are your character's greatest fear(s)? For Arthur, the answer's simple: having to choose between his family (Miirym) and his family (the Ziegfrieds). I honestly don't know which way he'd actually go if push came to shove, but if there are lives on the line I can honestly see the choice killing him. For Zanna...honestly, I'm not sure. Zanna's still a very new character to me, so there's a lot about her I don't know. She hasn't even finished her first Quest, so I'm not really sure what motivates her; she doesn't fear death, because as a Selkreeth true, lasting death is extremely unlikely in most cases, and as a [REDACTED] her old tribe doesn't really motivate her either. Deserts, perhaps? She's good friends with Addok-Zo, a desert-dweller, but I think the desert itself might prove too much for her. It's something I definitely want to consider for her as time goes on. What about you guys? I have a few guesses for some characters, but there's a lot of characters I don't really know, and I'd really be interested to find out.

Loot Distribution: Boris: Honeydrop Staff, 16 gold, Banana Zanna: 5 Gold, Apple Addok-Zo: Fire Bomb, Venom, Mead, 20 gold Pleased with her victory, but head somewhat sore from an unexplainable headache, Zanna waves at the carpented before joining the Blanton in the cart.

The Righteous Hand (Vindicators in the party can use any of the oaths in the wearer’s inventory, handwear, suitable for vindicators) This is a really awesome Artifact, can it be a thing added to the Marketplace as the Vindicator Class Artifact a la the Witch's Talisman/Hunter's Quiver/etc.?

Arthur cradles his head, a sudden headache having overtaken him. "Gods, not again..." he mutters, recalling unhappily the last time something like this had happened.

Urgh...the search function now only goes back a year at most. That's...that's completely useless.

Once you find your stats, click on the "posted 5 hours ago" (or whenever it shows the post was posted) bit in light gray on the upper-left side of the post; that'll link you to the post (the technical term is apparently "comment" now ) directly, and from there you just copy the address out of your browser's address bar. If I get time, I might see about manually rebuilding the first post of the Hero Stats topic for Sandy, since the general structure for internal links has changed; I'm not sure why the old-style link for Arthur in my signature properly redirects while the one for Zanna did not, but it's probably a good idea to start looking for internal links in Quests themselves and fixing them as well, otherwise they'll make no sense now.

This is another good point--I used to keep backups of my Heroica stats and compose battle posts in Notepad++. I don't use a rich-text word processor (if I absolutely need rich-text for something I can always use Google Docs and then print to either paper or PDF), so now without a plaintext mode I'm going to have to completely change how I back up and compose my posts. I get why the average internet user prefers WYSIWYG. Truth be told, I used to prefer it too. But losing that degree of precise low-level control is a major setback, and if I may vent for a moment about tech in general, it's both frustrating and worrying that many systems ranging from Wikia to forum software to Windows itself seem to be trying to hamper the power users who need that low-level control to create the things we do. By all means, tech industry, keep on improving interfaces and making new high-level tools so that the less tech-oriented can easily accomplish simple tasks. But don't take away the power users' options to actually get things done in the process. EDIT: Just to be clear! I by no means blame the staff here, in just the past 24 hours you've all done a TON of great things to improve the site usability. I'm just frustrated at all the options that have been taken away by elements beyond your control, and a bit overwhelmed at how much prep work on my projects has been rendered null and void in the process. You folks are awesome, and I really do thank you for all the time and energy you've invested and are continuing to invest in the upgrade.

That's...really unfortunate. In my experience with the RTE--both the one we had before the last major upgrade, and the one before this update--they have a tendency to add TONS of junk code to text, clogging up the editor and causing it to reach the character limit FAR earlier than it should. It's especially noticeable in situations like Heroica, where we rely heavily on being able to use formatting to keep things clean and easy-to-read. As an example of the junk code the old editor would add... And that's one of the posts with relatively simple formatting; it gets far more complicated with higher-level characters who have more items and more effects, facing more enemies with more complicated special abilities. Meanwhile, for the people who chose to struggle with the RTE anyway, they'd often have complications getting the editor to format things the way they actually wanted them formatted, and in several cases the editor would cut off their post halfway with a jumble of html in the middle. Now, I don't mind having to use HTML for formatting (though, admittedly, I am less familiar with it than I am with BBCode), but having to deal with a finicky RTE that won't let me convert it to plaintext even to troubleshoot it? That's a serious problem. I don't know what's going through Invision's heads, but the results are seriously counterproductive.

Bad news for everyone: BBCode support is dead. That means our archives are totally screwed. Hopefully the script will be able to go through and do a one-time conversion to whatever we use now (HTML?), but even still we may need to figure out a way to go through all the old Quests and undo the damage.

So what exactly DOES the site use to implement its formatting now? HTML? Even if that's the case, a plaintext solution would be very much appreciated.

Yeah, I find myself missing the manual editor as well. While I haven't had any problems with the new rich-text editor so far, based on my experience with the rich-text editors we've had in the past I just don't trust it not to mess up long, complex formatting. (The prime offender for this is Heroica, for me, but I'm sure there's plenty of other places on the forum where precise control is needed.) I agree with your other suggestions as well--at the risk of sounding like a broken record, these are all changes that would be significantly helpful for Heroica, since at the moment we're kind of still in disarray. *ominous villain lightning*

I'm told it'll be a couple weeks before the script gets to the old topics, but it will happen.

Whoa...quite a lot of good parts in this batch! I have to ask, what is the hairpiece in the "Rogue Leader" pic from? I know I've seen it before, but for the life of me I can't recall where.

Your signature links aren't.

Click the bell icon at the top and choose "Notification Settings", I'm still unclear myself on what corresponds to what, but I'm slowly figuring out the wording.

...oh dear, it looks like many links to individual posts are broken entirely. That's going to mess up a LOT of stuff in Heroica... (Example: see the link to Zanna's stats, as opposed to the link to Arthur's stats in my signature. Also, join/re-join Heroica while you're at it. )

I'm getting it for every single forum. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

Now you know why I always rail against the rich-text editor; it really liked to add several dozen of the same BBCode tag...over and over and over again... I still have nightmares of trying to clean people's stats because the excess tags would eventually overrun the characters-per-post limit. *shudders*