Per recent discussion, the news section has finally had some subtle but important changes!

All members of the cabinet can now post news items, which they can categorize into the appropriate section (by department). All news items will get listed in the "Latest news" block on the left side of the screen.

Then, the Internet Department can take selected news items of special importance and promote those to the front page, giving them extra prominence.

You can also subscribe via RSS to the front page feed or to the news channel for each section. Cool!

With the latest upgrade, there is an important change to the way Ship membership works. You must now actively "subscribe" to a ship before you can post on it. To do so, click the "Subscribe" link right above the Roster on any ship. You must then confirm your subscription.

To remove yourself from a ship, click "Manage subscription" (in the same place) and select unsubscribe. You can also optionally ask the system to send you an email every time a new Post is made on the ship if you wish.

There are a couple of new features this change enables, but COs have a little work to do first. :-)

The Internet Department is pleased to announce a new and shiny bug tracker, integrated directly into WeBBspace!

Visible in the primary links menu at the top of the page, you can now access a list of STF Projects. Right now there's just one, for WeBBspace itself, but we can add an unlimited number. For each project, you can create any number of issues, or tasks, that anyone can follow-up on or work on. We'll likely have one for each department before long.

From now on, all bug reports should be submitted to the WeBBspace project rather than posted in the IDept ship.

WeBBspace will be down for emergency maintenance from approximately 9 pm US Eastern Time to 10 pm US Eastern Time on Wednesday, 21 May. In order to implement some much needed performance improvements to keep our database server running properly, we will need to freeze the site in order to transfer the database to a backup server, run some update routines, and restore them to the live site.

The moment has finally arrived. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... WeBBspace.

effWeBB officially went offline at 3 PM US Eastern Time on 12 January 2008, ending a ten and a half year run as the home of STF. As much of a pain in the butt it always was, I have to admit that I did get a little teary-eyed when I took it offline, especially reading the farewell messages in OOC. It had run its course, however, and it is time to move forward.

To log in, go to the login box on the left side of the page and click "Request new password". Enter the username or email address you used from effWeBB. You will be emailed a one-time login link, which you can use to access your account. Be sure to change your password to something you can remember, and accept the newly-approved Terms of Service. While you're at it, you can also set a custom timezone. All dates will now be shown in your personalized timezone.

The transfer took longer than expected, primarily because some of the import scripts broke at the last minute and had to be rewritten. In the end it worked out, however, because that meant I was able to add one extra bonus.

In the end, we were able to import the most recent 8000 or so posts from effWeBB. That's everything that survived the most recent node archiver. Rock on!