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Hey @Sarex , There are actually a couple of solves for this. The first is that there is a system that carried over from the previous version where if you click the dot to the left of the thread link, it will take you to the first unread post. If you don't like that solution, you can also personalize how you see posts by clicking your Avatar icon at the top of the page and going to Account Settings. From there you can go to Content Preferences and set where you want to be taken when opening a thread I hope that helps!

That icon is actually a requirement of the system and the one there is the default choice. Their intention with it is that it informs if there are any sub-categories that are new that you haven't yet seen and the icon becomes faded when you've seen them all. I was thinking of changing it to the newspaper icon. What do you think?

Hey @Lexx , Unfortunately this was a major jump from Invision Forums v4.7.23 to v5.0.14 that has a lot of theming changes. We put the change off for a year, but ultimately had to make the change due to security reasons. We will be tweaking the theming a bit over time until our front-end web developer has time to make some other changes for us as he is currently working on updates to the company websites. In the meantime if you run into any issues, definitely let me know and I'll see what I can do to help make this as easy of a change as possible. For now, I tweaked the header to shrink it down a tad more, but I can't shrink it any more without cutting off the notification number (when you have one). It's also as close to the minimum size as the system will let me make it 😅 Edit: Speaking of big and clunky, this is how the Forums were in v5 by default until I changed it to be as close to what we had as I could. Thanks for the feedback!

@Sarex I bumped it up a bit. How does it look now? I don't want to make it too large either 😅

Sorry for the delay! We should be back online again (after some scary update stuff). Please excuse the theming as we update it over time, but if you notice any issues with functionality, please let us know so we can look into those. Thanks everyone!

9:30PM Update: Apologies folks. The update is proving to be a bit more complicated than initially thought. We will continue to prep the update and plan to push it live in the morning around 8AM Pacific. The downtime will hopefully take us less than an hour, but please excuse the interruption to the forum service as we try to update to the latest secure version of the forums. Thank you for your patience and understanding and sorry again for the interruption ❤️

Hey @Boeroer, I'm not sure your availability as of this message, but I was wondering if the forums were still chugging for you right now or if they happen to be stable. I noticed my phone getting alerts between 12:30 and 12:45 showing the forums going up and down multiple times, so it looks like it was pretty unstable around the time of your post (maybe a tad before). I'm curious if the forums struggling then happened to be the culprit. Otherwise, we have been trying to help boost the server allotment to help accommodate the large influx of new users and unregistered guests as we were reaching nearly 2k concurrent users which with 60k queries per minute at times which was stressing the server. We've also been deleting some bad actor IPs we suspect of attacking the forums to leave room for all you good actors to do your thing It's currently looking like we have about half as many users right now as compared to the 2k peak, so I'm hoping the forums are a bit more stable for you now (as they are for me at the moment) than they were earlier, but I'd still be curious to know. As for the reacting to posts failing @Chilloutman and Boeroer, is that a consistent issue you are noticing or is it seemingly random? Thanks a bunch for the reports and for helping us to make the forums a more enjoyable experience!

Hey @Trinmob89, I'm sorry you are running into the same issue. I may have already been told about you having this issue as someone from our Player Support team asked me to test the site to make sure applications were still coming in and indeed they still are and does allow us to submit on various browsers and PCs. We aren't quite sure why you and Notserpent are running into this issue, but our backend web developer is trying to figure out what the cause might be. In any case, you did the right thing reaching out to the support channels as they will get your resume submitted for you 😀 One question that did come to mind was if you happen to use any VPN software? I'm curious if that might affect our system from interacting with users. Hopefully we can get this sorted out so you and others don't run into this issue in the future. Thank you for letting us know about this issue and for submitting an application to join us on our adventures in making worlds for our players!

Hey folks! Just checking in on how things are for you. Things seem to be a bit faster on my end, but I am still seeing the forums go down a couple times a day (for about a minute) from all the spamming some of these bad IPs are doing. We are considering the possibility of adding a limit to the amount of actions per second users can do to help a bit as it seems some of these spammers are sending nearly a thousand requests within a few minutes. That said, we also don't want to limit all of your experiences either, though I doubt yall are clicking on links or posting as much as that. In any case, hearing how your experience has been the past week would be great to hear if you have the time. Thanks a ton everyone and sorry for any slowness you've been experiencing.

Hey folks, Thank you for letting us know! We've been seeing the same thing ya'll have been reporting, so it's nice to get confirmation of all the loading time issues (and time outs). We recently updated the forums early last week and on top of that, it seems like we've been getting hit pretty hard by a bunch of spam accounts and "guests". As a result, our backend webmaster has gone through the system and deleted a large amount of the spam IPs on Saturday as a temp measure to help alleviate the server stress a bit. That said, he is still looking at other ways to help optimize our browsing experience and also considering increasing the backend scaling to help the server in times of heavy load. As you notice any changes whether good or bad, we appreciate the notifications so we can continue to make adjustments to make the forums have a smoother and more enjoyable experience. Thanks as always everyone

Great blog @Gorth! My start in gaming was my (at the time) new step-dad's Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario Bros. 3 getting me into consoles. Not long after, my blood-related dad got me into PC games with DOOM and Wolfenstein share ware via the old hard floppy disks people shared (got ours from my uncle). I wasn't aware of Interplay or Black Isle, but I did play KotOR 1 for the first time on my friend's Xbox and immediately fell in love. Ended up getting it on PC and when I saw the sequel nearly died until I saw that it was made by some company named Obsidian instead of Bioware. At the time I was like, "Oh man, it's not Bioware? This game is probably going to suck..." To my surprise I enjoyed it even more. Being able to corrupt my companions, especially taking the time to corrupt Mira just felt epic compared to only seeing Bastilla corrupt in the previous title. Years later, I end up seeing South Park and the Stick of Truth and seeing Obsidian and saying, "Oh yea, I forgot about them." I played that game and looooved it, especially Butters as Professor Chaos. It wasn't until my old co-worker from Best Buy reached out to me to play a new game he was a part of developing called Pillars of Eternity that I would forever remember the name Obsidian. He is the one who ultimately helped get me into the gaming industry within Obsidian and I am forever grateful as it's allowed me to work with amazing, creative people both in the studio and within the community. After almost 8 years, I still can't believe the things I get to do and the people I get to do it with. Another thing that your blog resonated with me was your experience playing Fallout, as I started playing it a week ago and only JUST beat that game technically this morning around 1AM and continued to start up Fallout 2. I can't wait to continue the adventure tonight 😀

Hey @mkreku, I'm sorry you've been running into this issue with the Authentication System. I'll have our back-end web developer look into that issue so that you and others have the proper ability to remove the two-factor authentication as needed. In the meantime, I've gone ahead and removed the 2FA from your account so if you would like, you can set it up again without having to use the recovery codes. Thank you for bringing this authentication issue to my attention and sorry again for all the inconvenience its been causing you over the past couple of years.

Hey folks! Sorry for the state the forums have been in lately. From what we have seen, there has been a rather large increase in new members and even bigger increase in non-membered guests visiting the forums as of late, especially after Grounded went to PlayStation and Nintendo. We think the added traffic has been slowing things down a bit, so on Monday night (4/22), we bumped up our database service to try to help with performance. At the moment, I'm not noticing any slowdowns, but if you happen to run into any significant issues or slowdowns, please do let us know so we can look into it further and potentially increase the database service even more.

Hey Bart, It should look like how you see it now. I think you got lucky and missed the in between when it looked like what you see below.

Hey Sarex, Thanks for the heads up. We had a certificate for the MS Login expire and renewed the certificate on Tuesday. I also heard Fionavar was running into the same issue as you whereas I haven't seemed to run into this yet. I'll have our web programmer take a look tonight to see if he can see what might be causing the issue. If you have any updated in the coming days, please let us know so we can be better informed on the issue. Thanks as always and sorry for the trouble with the login system.