Forums are back up and open for testing!

Hello space ladies and gents

The security of the forum package we delivered to you in April was regrettably not as bulletproof as we had hoped. Though we were fortunate not to suffer any damage, I want to extend an apology on behalf of all of us that worked on the new forums.

Our trusted Senior Security Administrator, CCP Sreegs, did a great job of explaining in his dev blog the extent to which the "new forum exploit" compromised security. In a following blog, CCP Rhayger walked readers through the reasons why we went with the YAF software solution as a base for our new EVE Online forums. The difficulties we had with our new forum system led to some soul-searching and prompted us to bring our internal and external processes under comprehensive scrutiny. We immediately set to work to fix the problem at hand and gulped down the helpful medicine of your feedback.

In this blog, I want to introduce you to some improvements we are rolling out with this rerelease of the new EVE forums that you can try out now on testforums.evegate.com.

In the unlikely event that you encounter any security issues as you explore the new forums, please send an email to security@ccpgames.com and file a bug report. Please note two things that are paramount to us having the information we need to respond to your security feedback:

1. Please provide us with details regarding the issue, including reproduction steps when possible.
2. You must not abuse an exploit should you discover one, whether as a "prank" or otherwise. CCP is a corporation and we must treat all exploitation of our corporate assets with extreme seriousness. What may be humorous to you may also be a crime in whatever country you're pulling your masterful prank from.

For more of CCP's Sreegs advice on how to file a good bug report, please go to his dev blog.

New Forum features
In addition to addressing the security issues with the "old new" forums, we took some time to squeeze in changes based on your feedback. We are rolling out some UI improvements that we hope make for a better user experience for you on the new EVE forums.

[](//cdn1.eveonline.com/community/devblog/2011/Compact view.PNG)

Beside your N****ormal view that we introduced in our last release, you now have an option to view threads in a C****ompact view (above). These settings are located in the thread title bar where you can easily switch between them. Once you set your view of choice, it stays that way until you change it again. The avatar image has been reduced from size 128x128 to 64x64 and all other character information can be accessed by clicking the user name, which takes me to the next feature I want to tell you about: the Character Dropdown List.

[](//cdn1.eveonline.com/community/devblog/2011/Character dropdown list.PNG)

When clicking on the character name, you will get a dropdown list of handy links and information to help you keep in contact and follow your forum friends and trolls. With one simple click, you can send an EVE Mail to a forum user, show all of his/her forum posts or go directly to their EVE Gate profiles. The dropdown list shows you the name and logo of the Corporation/Alliance he or she is a member of and the number of Likes the user has received overall. It also provides the next feature on my list: the ability to HIDE posts (image below) from characters that you simply don't wish to see.

[](//cdn1.eveonline.com/community/devblog/2011/Hide posts.PNG)

By clicking "Hide posts" in the Character Dropdown List, all posts by this specific user will appear hidden on the forums. Yes, you heard me right. If someone is leaving you steaming and stomping every time you go onto the forums, you can simply HIDE the user's posts. The posts will then appear collapsed. You will see if the hidden user posts a reply in a thread and can choose to read it by clicking "View post". If you feel ready to unhide the posts you can click "Show posts" which will then make all posts by that user visible again.

In addition, based on your feedback, we did a lot of UI tweaks touching font size and color, quotes, buttons, design and performance. We will be adding more requested features in the future. I can safely say that we have some pretty nifty things up our sleeves for you.

Deployment schedule and migration
The current (AKA original) EVE forums will remain on eveonline.com in an archived state for read-only reference. There will be a grace period between the opening the new forums and freezing the old ones, giving you advance notice for when the migration will happen. Exact dates are TBA; we will keep you posted on the exact time of when the old forums will close.

We hope you will join us for the public testing. If everything goes smoothly we are scheduled to release the new forums to EVE Gate again within the next few weeks. Keep providing us with your much appreciated feedback!

Cheers,

CCP Elais