Since someone was messing around and deleted my original announcement accidentally, *glares at ultimatox* I'll announce Trident 2.0 again, and go into a little more detail while I'm at it. The Backstory Up until now we have been using a combination of phpBB (free forum software, development's gone stale on it, very little updates over past few months) and a custom coded web application dubbed "Trident Web". These two were integrated to an extent (login system, users, permissions, etc.) but the integration was very much so hardcoded into the application. It would have been extremely difficult to move the Trident Web codebase to another forum software, which is why we put up with phpBB for so long. Many months ago the Trident council had a meeting and decided that enough was enough and we wanted to run something better for you guys. We settled on the XenForo forum software since it's modern and under very active development, plus the cost isn't too high. We purchased a sexy theme for it and then I had to get to work on it. I brought TheCainer on board and we started work on TRIDServ (Trident Services). TRIDServ is a modular, extremely extensible web application which tightly integrates into a forum software (which one doesn't matter, and as such if we ever want to move again it'll be very easy). Whenever you use any of the site's tools, visit the charter, join a Game Division, etc. you are using TRIDServ. In addition to that Magnavode recoded the Mumble authenticator and created the backend code for the channel viewer that's now on the homepage. TheCainer rewrote the IRC bot modules so that it would work with TRIDServ. Once everything was all finished and ready to go (yesterday morning), I got to work on migrating over the old forums, and well the rest you can see! New Stuff The new "Trident event clock" allows you to set a date and time and then distribute a link to people which shows that date/time in their local timezone, along with a sexy countdown and also the date/time in all of the EU timezones. Try it out here: https://tridentoutfit.com/tools/clock You can look up a Planetside 2 player's statistics right from TRIDServ and see how far they are from their next rank and some other basic statistics and information about them, to look up a player just go to the Tools area and type their name into the Planetside 2 Character Statistics tool, here's my stats page: https://tridentoutfit.com/tools/ps2/characterstatistics/JackJack233 The promotion nominations area (Sergeants+ only) has been redeveloped completely and the UI drastically changed. It should now be a lot easier to use and also a lot faster! https://tridentoutfit.com/tools/promotions The staff and roster pages have been integrated together and the result is pretty nice looking if I do say so myself! https://tridentoutfit.com/roster The charter has been reformatted and is a lot easier to navigate and read, it also includes new information on the runnings of the Council and full clarification on ranking structures https://tridentoutfit.com/charter You can now link additional characters to your account from the Linked Characters page or unlink old irrelevant characters https://tridentoutfit.com/user/characters The IRC and Mumble pages have both had a UI redesign to make them easier to use There's now a real time Mumble server viewer on the homepage, as well as a sexier real time IRC online users list The latest forum announcement now appears on the homepage Since the forums have changed to XenForo they're obviously a lot different Mumble usernames now follow the format [TRID] [★★★★★] JackJack233 (Councillor), note that the title at the end is only displayed for Directors and Councillors to distinguish them from regular members Lots of other stuff I've forgotten! Thanks Special thanks go to TheCainer and Magnavode for all their help in making Trident 2.0 a reality, and of course to all of you guys for your generous donations which allow us to keep everything running and purchase cool pieces of software like XenForo! Hope you enjoy everything! --Jack
Wasn't the previous forum the Woltlab Burning Board (and not phpBB)? Anyhow, XenForo is a pretty sweet software, so I welcome the change!