Lowyat.NET: Latest topics in Announcements

Selamat Menyambut Bulan Ramadhan, from Lowyat.NET

wKkaY — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:35:45 +0800

On behalf of Lowyat.NET, I would like to extend our best wishes to our Muslim community who commence the Ramadhan season today.

To commemorate this season as well as Aidilfitri next month, we have put up songkok smileys, courtesy of firedauz

Temporary downtime 260808,

se7en — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:45:35 +0800

Our service provider experienced a loss of network connection earlier today during a planned uplink upgrade exercise.

The faults have since been rectified and order is now officially restored to the LYN Universe.

*goes back to troll hunting*

Kopitiam Cleanup Operation,

se7en — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:11:17 +0800

We were hoping they would grow up, but that seems to be wishful thinking now.

For the next week, and until a time when we believe order has been restored, moderators have been instructed to suspend on sight any member found trolling, creating unnecessary flame threads and using profanities (short form and creative spelling included) anywhere across the board - especially the Kopitiam sections.

We do allow for the occasional random postings, even unnecessary spam in the kopitiam, but please do not abuse it to the point that it interferes with the topic being discussed. Treat your fellow members with respect, and post constructively.

PM upgrade - conversation-style messaging,

wKkaY — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:41:20 +0800

The PM system has been upgraded to incorporate conversations. When you read a message now, other messages in the conversation will also be shown. To help distinguish the current message, the other messages are faded. Some messages may be missing however, if either party deletes them.

This feature should hopefully help you track PMs more easily. And as a bonus to us, it allows us to save storage space (as nested quotes are not necessary anymore), so expect a inbox size upgrade soon

As part of the migration to the system, quotes in old messages are currently shown in <spoiler> tags to prevent them from filling up the page. New messages will NOT be quoted and will therefore NOT have this spoiler tag.

As usual, please post your feedback in the Feedback/Helpdesk section of the forum..

Just a few things...,

RBR — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:35:48 +0800

Some personnel changes:-

1. alien2003 is now a full moderator.

2. Asendure and shockw@ve have tendered their resignations as Staffs due to work and other commitments.

3. jhcj, yongkailoon and stevenistelrooy have been appointed as Staffs.

New feature - Topic thumbnails,

wKkaY — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:20:35 +0800

The Photo Gallery and Galleries de Celebrities sections have been enabled with thumbnails. This limited trial may be extended to other subforums later on.

[attachmentid=436159]

To set a thumbnail for an existing topic, simply edit the first post and enter an image URL into the textbox labeled "Thumbnail URL". This textbox also appears when you create a new topic.

[attachmentid=436160]

Minor feature - "Recently viewed me",

wKkaY — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:06:49 +0800

You are now able to see the people who have recently viewed your profile. Depending on their visibility setting, you will see either their member group or their name. An example is provided below.

[attachmentid=434421]

You can change your visibility to others here --> http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?act=UserCP&CODE=04 . By default, only your member group is shown (i.e. "stalker mode").

Moderator accounts compromised,

wKkaY — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:47:50 +0800

Two moderator accounts were compromised yesterday.

Goldfries - MSN account on Sunday night
Ah Wang - LYN account at about 1-2am

Solicitations for cash and Paypal funds have been made through these accounts. If you have received these solicitations, please contact me at waikeen@lowyat.net to help with our investigation.

Please take caution when dealing with anyone, including the members of our moderating team.

Vulgarities and Profanities,

RBR — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:57:10 +0800

The use of vulgarities is prohibited. It was never allowed in the first place, which is why we filtered them out. However, since people are circumventing the filters, from now on, if you use 'fark' or any other word which is essentially conveying the same thing, it is punishable by a warning.

To reflect this as official policy, we have dutifully updated the board R&R:- http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?act=boardrules

Action: Using profanities or vulgarities, as determined according to discretion of a member of the moderating team
Result: A warning is issued for the first offence, and suspensions for multiple offences.

The reasons why its not allowed:-

1. It is unnecessary. Other words will serve you just as well.

2. LYN is viewed in offices, schools, colleges, universities and even at home where parents might not approve of foul language. Its important we have an image as a clean forum.

3. It is uncouth.

4. Plenty of people are misusing the leverage we've been giving so far.

There will be plenty of grey areas, which will be dealt with at the discretion of the moderator.
There will be inconsistencies, which is an unfortunate consequence of every new rule.
There will be misgivings, but they should iron out after a while.

If you're concerned, the best way is simply to avoid putting yourself in a situation where it may be seen as vulgar.

As always, Feedback Desk for any feedback

Forum rearrangements, Webmasters, DC++

wKkaY — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 02:26:55 +0800

The subforum previously known as Blogsentral has been renamed to Blogmasters & Webmasters and now serves the broader webmastering scene as well. It has also been upgraded to be a first-class subforum of the Special Interests category Please keep your bookmarks up to date with this change. We are also looking for moderators for this section of the forum; if you are interested just send me a PM.

The DC++ forum on the other hand has been taken offline due to project inactivity.

Happy New Year!,

nexus- — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:15:51 +0800

On behalf of the Lowyat.NET team I wish everyone a very happy and prosperous 2008! May this year be better than the previous one!

Here are the awesome fireworks seen from Sydney!

[YOUTUBE]kgBAZXpVl-E[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]kfTBG3htPIc[/YOUTUBE]

Ho Ho Ho!,

RBR — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 01:02:47 +0800

A very Merry Christmas to all LYNers celebrating Christmas, and Happy Holidays to the rest

Merchandise Sales,

RBR — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 22:13:39 +0800

This is an announcement to all, in particular to those involved in the printing and subsequent sale of merchandise in the Trade Zone bearing logos and/or names of brands or companies (football clubs, TV show, car, product etc).

Unless you obtain written permission from the respective companies, you may not sell such products on Lowyat.NET. You are most likely in breach of trade mark laws, and the last thing we need is a lawsuit.

If you already have such a thread running:-
1) Close the thread immediately.
2) If printing has been ordered, fulfill all sales via PM.
3) If printing has not been ordered yet, conduct refunds immediately.

If you are unsure as to whether your thread would infringe trade mark laws, drop me a PM and I'll try my best to help you out

Board updates!,

RBR — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 16:48:22 +0800

Here are some recent updates:-

- A section ~~tentatively~~ named ~~"Life's Matters"~~ Roundtable Discussions will house the more serious subforums from Lifestyle.

- Anime Shrine sits on its own...

- Blogsentral and the Malaysian Blogosphere is now a subforum in Kopitiam.

Personnel updates:-

- The 4 probationary moderators (sihumchai, MayAnne, c9 and cherroy) are now full moderators

- 7 'retirements'. They are chewxy, Gigabitz, bwan, winD, Shinigami, Yukito and perror.

- One new staff so far - goldfries.

Cheers all!

Server Upgrade Notice [update],

se7en — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:35:35 +0800

We will be upgrading our database server this Thursday (6th September 07). We expect this exercise to take anywhere between 2 to 5 hours.

The forums will be taken offline from 1030pm to 12am (and probably be inaccessible up till 5am depending on any complications that might happen during the transfer).

The new database server should be able to cope with the peak hour load that has been causing the recent increase in "server busy" messages.

LYN T-Shirt Design Competition Winners!,

se7en — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 02:23:50 +0800

Just to recap, since this competition was run back in March (sorry for the long delays - been a bit tied up with my day job)

We ran a t-shirt design competition back in March (refer here)

We received close to 200 entries (and 30 entry rosak), and had a tough time narrowing down the final 10.

We finally did, and voting for the best design that would be sent to print commenced on 30th May 07. ( refer here)

The eventual winner was MOHD HAZIQ BIN ISHAK with this design. Congratulations dude!

Mohd Haziq's design wins him a slightly new (we opened it up for a 2 day review) Samsung Z560 HSPDA phone.

Well, one happy winner, and we've got our new "official" LYN t-shirt ready for printing.

While we did mention on the opening day of the contest that there would be only one winner, we felt that there wasn't much fun in just having one winner.

So, we went out and found our nice friends over at GIGABYTE to see if they could help us out. And help us out they did. Our sincere gratitude goes out to Mr Anson Chen, Marketing Manager for GIGABYTE Malaysia for chipping in not one but two Gigabyte GeForce Graphic cards for the winners!

And the lucky winners are Andrew who wins himself a GIGABYTE GeForce 7900GT and Chia Sheng Ching who wins himself a GIGABYTE GeForce 7600GT.

Once again, a huge thank you to Mr Anson Chen from GIGABYTE.

There were plans to have an official prize giving ceremony with balloons and confetti, but we then realized that all our three winners are from out of town, namely Pahang, Penang and Melaka. Getting them here was one thing, getting them here all at the same time was even more complicated, so we decided to just mail them the prizes and make them snap pictures of themselves!

T-shirts go on sale a few days before Merdeka in case you were wondering. Watch this space.

Vista!,

RBR — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 10:28:21 +0800

A new subforum for all your Windows Vista needs

http://forum.lowyat.net/WindowsVista

Search improvements,

wKkaY — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 09:51:06 +0800

Improvements have been made to the search engine:

- Changed fulltext indexer from MySQL to Sphinx, using Prolag's Sphinx IPB mod. Results can be obtained much faster and without slowing everyone else down, while being as reliable or better as the previous method. We hope
- Word length cutoff reduced to 2 (from 3)
- Search cooldown period reduced to 10 seconds (from 15)

Please let us know through the feedback forum if you encounter any difficulties. Cheers

Search engine improvements,

wKkaY — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 09:44:16 +0800

Improvements have been made to the search engine:

- Changed fulltext indexer from MySQL to Sphinx (thanks to Prolag's Sphinx IPB mod). Results can be obtained much faster and without slowing everyone else down, with hopefully more reliable results!
- Word length cutoff reduced to 2 (from 3)
- Search cooldown period reduced to 10 seconds (from 15)

Please let us know through the feedback forum if you encounter any difficulties. Cheers

List of 'no post count' subforums.,

RBR — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 09:50:13 +0800

Since this is a source of consternation for many members, we've taken the liberty (with a little help from stevenistelrooy) to update our FAQ list or which subforums have post count and which don't.

The following are subforums where there is no post count:-

1. Announcements
2. Main Site/Forum Feedback and Helpdesk
3. Events and Gatherings
4. Gamers' Hideout + its subforums
5. Consoles Couch + its subforums
6. Kopitiam + its subforums
7. Movies & Music + its subforums
8. Trade Zone (Garage Sales, Bulk Orders, Classifieds)
9. Broadband User-2-User
10. Members Store
11. Hardware Questions & Answers
12. Hobbies & Modelling
13. Girls Club + its subforums
14. Trade Zone Dispute Resolution
15. Travel & Living
16. LYN T-Shirt Design Competition '07

We'll try to update the FAQ as often as possible.
http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?act=faq&article=3