Hello,

I have recently switched our forum software back to Invision Community from NodeBB.

I have not taken this decision lightly, but there are various reasons.

The way the NodeBB software is setup is that we rely on "plugins" for all the additional features we use on our website. Unfortunately, none of these are maintained anymore, so it would require us to fork and maintain all the plugins we were using ourselves or pay for NodeBB for "support" to do it.

I would rather we pay for software subscription than for support each time we do a software update.

I have spent today migrating everything from NodeBB to Invision Community.

I have managed to migrate all the users (6,000+), forum categories (300+), topics (3,100+) and posts (320,000+) but I was unable to migrate groups or profile covers/photos.

You might need to reset your password before you can login.

I have setup our built in bug tracker so you will no longer need to submit issues via GitHub. You can request access back to your private forums as long as you are the organisation leader/hq

Feel free to use the forums as normal, all the features you are used to using will be added back over the next week.

You may experience a few issues with posts where coloured text, spoilers, centering of text/images or embed videos no longer work as these did not use standard markdown and was unable to be converted to WYSIWYG.

If you are the owner of these post, you will need to edit and adjust accordingly.

If for some reason you prefer the "light mode" (eye cancer) theme, you can select this by going to the bottom of the site, clicking "Theme" and selecting "Default".

If you have any issues, please contact me on Discord.

On behalf of the team, we would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays.

Thank you for sticking with us and your continued support for the last 19 years. 👏

I will be hosting a power hour tomorrow (Thursday 29th Dec) from 7pm (19:00 GMT/Server Time) and will be hosting a few other events afterwards in which you can win various rewards.

I will ping everyone again on discord, 10 mins before it starts as a reminder.

I hope to see you there.

P.S. A special thanks goes to @Yannick for sponsoring the event.

https://discord.gg/saes-rpg-229936715383439361?event=1057678683818709153

Happy New Year from us all at SAES.

Thanks for being part of the community, especially those who have been in a position to help keep us running, it's really appreciated.

I have a few things left to work on in the next few days in regards to the website, but once that's complete, I will start working my way through the suggestions forum and will look at implementing changes you guys want (and need).

Unfortunately polls did not transfer with the migration, so please setup new polls and spread the word.

Cheers 👍

Hi All,

Since we have moved to this forum software, we have been able to access a feature called "Clubs".

Clubs allows people to maintain their own section, moderators, members and also allows people to setup forums, pages etc without the need of waiting for an admin to set them up manually.

All your private topics, posts etc is still available and would be moved to either option you choose.

With this in mind, I've setup a poll to decide what you would like to do going forward.

1. Use clubs for maintaining your own private section of the forum with minimal need to contact an admin to maintain your area.
   (We currently don't have a way to make it partially open and partially closed in a club, so you would still need a topic in the gang/group/civ forum for your applications as clubs are private).
    
2. Go back to the old method of waiting for admins to setup private forum sections for people to use, however this time round, we would not be setting up groups, we would set "passwords" on forums which you would need to wait for admins to change (which would get boring quick, as you would potentially need to change it each time you kick or someone leaves to stop them viewing your private content)

You can vote and give your opinions here: 

The poll ends on Friday 6th Jan, 8:30am GMT

As you've probably noticed, the side widget it back showing live server information, however, we have built upon the framework to show better information.

If you click on the player count on the side widget, you will now see more information about the players on the server other than "ping" as we no longer use the built in MTA query protocol.

Live server information: https://saesrpg.uk/server/live/

The plan is eventually you'll be able to link your forum account to your game account to show more information on the page and your profile.

In other news, I've now shut down the RvB server completely as its not been used for years.

As the other poll has now closed and people want to go with clubs, I wanted to ask some additional questions.

You can create the following with clubs:

• Member forum where club members can view and participate in topics.
• Public forum where club members can view and participate but public can only "view" topics there.

It doesn't appear that we can allow public members to post within a closed club at this time.

We are unable to create HQ only forums in clubs at this time either, but I'm not sure this much of a problem as you all have your own discord servers where you can keep HQ only data.

I am exploring options that will give us greater control over clubs and possibly give us the features we need, but as they are all paid options, I will need to make sure we get the right one before purchasing.

So I have two suggestions how we could deal with it going forward:

1. USE CLUBS - We would create a form similar to https://saesrpg.uk/ban-appeal/ where you would select the club you are applying for from a dropdown list which would post within the chosen clubs for club moderators and leaders to deal with, this still gives you access to a private and public facing forum within your club and will allow self moderating without the involvement of admins.
    
2. USE FORUMS - Use groups for HQ/moderators to moderate your current sections and use passwords for normal members to access your private forum categories (similar to how it was on archive.saesrpg.uk, you would still wait for admins to set these groups up and add people to them and change passwords when people leave/quit to stop them accessing your private data.)

Please vote and leave your questions/suggestions here: 

Congratulations to @Ferreira who has won Blueberry Bank in the December raffle.

Please contact a member of SAES or SAHA in-game to be given your reward.

You have 7 days to claim your prize before another winner is picked.

We will be collating all the other stats from December over the weekend and handing out various prizes next week.

Now that you've decided you still want to use Clubs, we need to decide on a uniformed application form.

Please give you feedback here:

Following up on MTA's ban amnesty (https://forum.multitheftauto.com/topic/139214-ban-amnesty-everyone-got-unbanned/), SAES HQ has decided to also grant amnesty to players that have previously been banned for breaking our server's rules.

At the start of this new year, we would like to give everyone previously banned player a chance to have another opportunity to abide by our rules and enjoy the server the way it's intended.

This ban amnesty is not a wildcard to return to our server and break rules again, as we will still keep the ban records in our punishment logs.
This means that if we notice players who have returned from a ban immediately start breaking our rules again or start misbehaving once again, we will moderate your actions accordingly.

If you have genuine intentions of returning to our server in good faith, you are more than welcome to take this opportunity.

Before returning to our server, be sure to refresh your mind by reading our server rules at in the Rules & Guidelines subforum (https://saesrpg.uk/forums/forum/246-community-rules-guidelines-help/).

Should you find yourself still banned after this amnesty, you can create a ticket using the #support-tickets channel on our Discord (https://discord.com/channels/229936715383439361/758395783631863839) so we can look into this situation.