I am always working on GTPlanet to add new features and modifying existing settings, and this thread will be used to announce and document many of these changes.
To be notified of these announcements, click the "Watch Thread" button above this post.
If you have any questions regarding any new features announced here, please create a thread here in the Site Support forum and myself or a member of the staff will help you as soon as we can.
It is now (once again) possible to give a GTPlanet Premium subscription as a "gift" to another user.
To give a subscription, click here and enter the name of the user you would like to send the gift to. The recipient will not be notified of who purchased their subscription, should you wish to remain anonymous.
I have made a few changes to the site's mobile template to improve page rendering speed on Android and older/low-end smartphones (specifically, the box-shadow attribute has been removed on page elements when the screen width is < 670 pixels).
You can now click the checkboxes next to each conversation stored in your Inbox to be presented with a pop-up box that allows you to perform common actions on multiple conversations at the same time. A "Select All" box is also displayed in the pop-up to help you manage a large number of messages.
Also, text around the avatar upload form has been modified so it's easier to read.
As some of you may know (having experienced it yourself), your GTPlanet account can become "deactivated" if your email provider rejects or "bounces" messages from the site. Depending upon the severity of the error message GTPlanet received from your email provider, the server may blacklist your address, refusing to send any further messages.
This would effectively make it impossible for you to re-activate your account, leading to a lot of confusion, and a lot of additional work for myself. To fix this, I have built an automated system which will automatically remove your email address from GTPlanet's blacklist when you attempt to re-activate your account. Hopefully this will save a lot of frustration and confusion in the future.
NOTE: If your email service provider is blocking GTPlanet's messages from being delivered to your Inbox, that is, of course, still beyond my control, but this will guarantee that they are at least being sent out.
Changes have been applied to the WYSIWYG post editor to improve typing speed on mobile devices, specifically Android Nexus devices and others running Android OS 4.4. If this issue was affecting you and you see an improvement (or not), please comment here.
Additionally, all user avatars, post thumbnail attachments, and various other files on GTPlanet's web pages are now being cached and delivered from a new geographically distributed content delivery network to improve loading speed for international visitors.
A new Gran Turismo Suggestions forum is now available to help organize and prioritize our community's thoughts and opinions. The forums are displayed with custom formatting to highlight the number of "likes" the first post (or the "suggestion") has received, along with easy access to links which sort threads by the total number of likes received.
Users are reminded of new suggestion guidelines when submitting new suggestions.
Due to the high rate of posting in the new Suggestions forum (announced above) and the generic nature of those topics, these threads are now excluded from the Recent Posts news feed.
You can still "Watch" or subscribe to each Suggestion forum, should you wish to be notified about new content posted there.
A bug has been resolved which caused ads to be displayed to new Premium users who signed up for the service since the introduction of GTP12. Additionally, these changes should resolve the issue which some Premium users were experiencing which resulted in their subscriptions not expiring as expected.
Comments have once again been integrated into articles on the GTPlanet News blog.
Although comments cannot be posted to most recent articles posted to the blog, comments will be available on new articles posted beyond this date. I have opened two previous articles for comments if you'd like to begin using the feature now:
Comments on older articles, before the GTP12 transition, are also visible once again. Comments will not be allowed to posts which are older than 30 days.
As always, please report any bugs or issues here in the Site Support forum.
Post attachments and new avatar uploads have been temporarily disabled while I complete server infrastructure maintenance. You can still hotlink images into your posts from other websites and free image hosting providers.
The maintenance is not expected to last more than a few hours; I will make another announcement when this functionality has been enabled again. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
I'm very excited to announce that I've completed implementation of an entirely new, dedicated search engine for GTPlanet's forums. The new search engine solves subtle - yet significant - limitations which have caused difficulties for our community since its inception. Here's what's new:
You can now search for keywords of less than three characters - even one character, if you like. There is no longer a minimum keyword length. This means you can now search for terms like "GT5", "GT6", "BMW", or "R8" - none of which would have returned any meaningful results before this update.
Keywords will now match partial results. This means if a search for the keyword "test" will include results for "tests", "testing", and "testers". Previously, only exact keywords were matched.
You can now sort results based on relevancy when using the advanced search form. Results will still be sorted by recency (newest first) by default, but you now have the option to use basic heuristics in your search when you need it.
While making life on GTPlanet that much easier for everyone, improved search results will offer greatest benefits in our tuning and Photomode forums, and should help reduce duplicate entires in our GT Suggestions forum, making it easier to find and vote on the suggestions which are most important to you.
It's worth noting the search engine is limited to the forums - you'll still need to use our site-wide search, powered by Google, if you want to include News blog posts in your query.
Of course, this search engine could still be considered in "beta" and will likely experience some issues in its first few days. Please give it a try and report any problems you may find here in our Site Support forum.
Attachments and avatar uploads will be temporarily disabled for the next few hours due to GTPlanet server maintenance. The site may also be closed entirely, to all visitors, for a few minutes during this maintenance period.
GTPlanet's server maintenance is complete, and the site is now running on new hardware in a new datacenter.
As always, please report any problems you may find with a new thread here in our Site Support forum. There may be other minor issues arise as auxiliary services are transferred to the new facility throughout the rest of the week.
Private conversations will now only trigger one notification email when they receive a new reply until you view the conversation again, effectively functioning exactly the same as thread subscriptions.
Previously, each new reply from every conversation participant would trigger a notification message, so a busy conversation thread could quickly generate a high volume of email.
You still have the option to completely disable emails from a single conversation using the "Email Notifications" button at the top of any conversation page.
Over the next few hours (4-5, estimated), searches will return incomplete or outdated results while maintenance is performed on the site's forum search engine. This post will be updated when the maintenance is complete.
Meanwhile, you can continue using the global site search to retrieve more general results.
The maintenance is now complete and the search engine is once again fully operational.
A major software update has been applied to GTPlanet, introducing several new features and correcting numerous bugs:
Tag Users in Status Updates
You can now use the @ symbol to tag other users in your profile posts and profile post comments. As with regular posts, the other users will be notified via alert when they are mentioned (depending upon their notification settings).
Note: There is a known bug affecting how user tags are displayed on the forum home page; this will be resolved within the next few days. The tags will be displayed as normal in the actual posts.
Report User’s Profile
You can now report a user directly from their profile page, regardless of whether or not they have posted any content. This will be useful if you think a user looks suspicious and may be a spammer, or if you just want to bring a user to the moderators’ attention without reporting any specific piece of content.
Improved Smartphone Photo Compatibility
Previously, you may have noticed some pictures uploaded to the forum with a smartphone may appear upside down when viewed on a PC. This bug has been resolved.
Improved Post Editor
You will find several of the buttons have been re-arranged and the WYSIWYG post editor controls have been streamlined. Several of less-used options will now be available from new buttons which trigger drop-down menus.
New Spoiler Tags
You can now use “Spoiler” tags to control how content is displayed within your posts. Any content you put between the tags will be replaced with a small button in your post, and a visitor must click the button before the content will be displayed.
To use it, click the “Insert” button in editor toolbar, select “Spoiler” and then follow the instructions. You can also manually type out the spoiler tags like follows:
Code:
[spoiler]This text will be hidden.[/spoiler]
This text will be hidden.
Code:
[spoiler=”Button Title”]This text will be hidden behind a named button.[/spoiler]
This text will be hidden behind a named button.
As you will notice, you can include a title for the spoiler button which is displayed. This can be used to provide a hint as to what the hidden text contains.
70+ Bug Fixes
This software update also fixes a long list of various bugs, the details of which are beyond the scope of this announcement.
Several features may appear broken over the next few days as custom template changes are applied. As always, please report any problems here in the Site Support forum and I will address them as soon as I can.
More changes and new features will be rolled out in the coming days; please subscribe to this thread to learn more about them as they are released.
The forum search engine will be disabled and may return incomplete results for the next few hours while maintenance is performed.
Once it is back online (it's back!), you will find the search feature has been improved to return more relevant results. It is also running on a new server, which should make the entire website more stable and reliable in the future.
As always, you can access the complete range of search tools on the advanced search page.
Several minor bugs introduced by the aforementioned forum software update have been resolved.
Also, user tag auto-completion now works when composing profile posts from any available form. Profile post comments support tag auto-completion as well.
The forum's advanced search capabilities are temporarily disabled while extensive maintenance is performed. For now, the search form available at the top of each page will allow you to quickly access the global site search, which will continue to function.
The famous "Multi-Quote" feature has returned to GTPlanet!
To use it, click the [+ Quote] button near the bottom right corner of any post on the forum. When you are ready to reply, click the new [Insert Quotes...] button below the post editor. This opens a box which shows all your selected posts; you can drag and drop the posts to re-arrange their order or remove them. (Note: there is currently a minor bug which prevents the message text from being displayed in the pop-up box. This will be fixed.)
Posts can be quoted from other threads and will retain their "permalink" information so they can easily be referenced in their original context and the original poster will be notified of the quote.
