Personal and Forum news, May 2024

[The Void]

Hi all,
Personal News:
I was pretty ill for all of 2020, had a slow recovery. Then had a mild injury, so all in all, I've not played v much kendama since late 2019. Been gently easing my way back in since this spring, and was enthused by attending the BKO this weekend. Great to see folks again, and to see the kendama scene thriving in the UK, with plenty of visitors from afar. From now on, since I'm so old and creaky, kendama will just be a fun bit of exercise for me. I won't be pushing myself too hard, and won't be organising anything. But I remain committed to keeping the grading system going and its records up to date on this site, though I probably won't be doing much travelling to events.

Forum News:
I ran a major software upgrade on the forum in December. We had been inundated by spam signups, so I'd had to lock it down. It's now open for registrations again - hopefully the new software will keep things smooth. The upgrade has broken some forum modifications though:
- Attachments. Unfortunately, the upgrade broke (almost) all the links between forum posts and their attachments. I still have backups of all the attachments, and although I've tried various ways to fix it, it really looks like I can't batch-repair them. I simply don't have time to manually repair 1700 of them, sorry. Future attachments should work okay, but links and embeds might be the best bet? Hmm :-(
- Google Member Maps. Since Google seems to be slowly turning evil, I probably won't bring this back. Please use the "Location" field in your forum profile.
- Gradings on your forum profile. This mod doesn't support SMFv2.1, so they're lost. BUT, there is a manageable number of forum members with gradings, so we can bring this back with a native mod in the new system. I'll work my way through the list, from the top down, to re-add your gradings to your profiles.
- Mentions. There is a new native Mentions system. It works exactly the same as the old one, so you shouldn't notice any difference, EXCEPT email notifications are now turned off by default, so please go to [your login name, at top of the screen]>Notifications and tick "Receive email" for "When my @name is mentioned in a post", and then click the "Save Settings" button at the bottom. Same goes for PMs and any other notifications you want active.
- This is probably a good time for you to check [your name]>Profile Details too. We've added a user field for Mastodon/Fediverse for anyone who's sick of the Evil CorporationsTM. Again, click the "Change Profile" button when you've finished any edits.
- Footnotes. This mod hasn't been updated for SMFv2.1, so you'll probably see a few "[ nb ]" tags around the place. Maybe they'll start working again in future, but at least they're all still readable for now.
- Embeds. Some might be broken, sorry. Especially tweets as Musk screwed everything up. It's his fault, not ours.

That'll do for now. Click on, folks!