After a magical attempt on her life in 1877, Queen Victoria launched a crusade against magic that, while tidied up by the Ministry of Magic, saw the Wizarding community exiled to Hogsmeade, previously little more than a crossroad near the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the years that have passed since, Hogsmeade has suffered plagues, fires, and Victorian hypocrisy but is still standing firm.
Thethe year is now 1894. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.Where will you fall?
Complete a thread in which every post is precisely 1000 words. The thread must be at least ten posts long, and at least three must be your own.
...Has been resolved! The cause was nickpic although it wasn't exclusively a nickpic issue, it could happen with any url if the link doesn't have a functioning website on the other end of it. The web browser tries to follow the link and it'll keep trying to find the image until it times out because it identifies it as a valid url. Meanwhile the webpage is taking longer than usual to finish loading even if it looks finished (note the loading icon at the top of the page). The browser finally gives up and lets the webpage finish loading, the post box will then revert to the state it was in when the page load started and everything you typed goes poof. The reason I believe it started happening was nickpic changing their url and then it got worse when nickpic shut down and all of the emotes in the cbox hosted on nickpic broke. You might not see the page of cbox smilies unless you click to open it, but it loads with every page. If you have any avatars with a nickpic link and those accounts are attached to your switcher, you will continue to have this issue. Your switcher might not be visible to you, but the browser loads it on every page. This may also happen if you reply to a thread where there's a broken nickpic image embedded in the last 16 posts, other people's avatars and signatures aren't included in the thread review so no need to worry about other people updating their links.
We're on the latest Mybb software! Yay! You may have heard about the update to PHP8 the other day - this broke a few features (someone mentioned the marking posts as read function specifically) but I believe they were fixed in this new update! While I updated to PHP 8 I made the difficult decision to uninstall our MentionMe plugin which was responsible for the tagging system.
"But, Olive, we can still tag people????"
Yes, I replaced it with a different plugin which works almost identically but it doesn't have the lovely autocomplete feature you could only use in the quick reply box. I did this because the plugin we were using was a couple of years out of date and the developer had decided not to update it anymore. I thought it might be responsible for the vanishing text. Turns out it wasn't, but it was only going to become increasingly more unstable with each new software update. The new plugin is actually our original plugin way back before the site move and that one is still being maintained.
You may or may not have noticed the absence of the @ symbol on tags. This was optional and I changed it on a whim because I thought it would be aesthetically more pleasing. If this proves to be wildly unpopular I can reinstate it.
Last but not least - the return of one of my favorite features! In the early Charming days I would use this to stalk for new posts because I didn't know there was a 'view new posts' function. I stopped relying on it once Mybb released a software update that broke it, then (I think Kayte?) found a fix for it and it worked again. I noticed this evening that I couldn't find the button and it turns out that Mybb released an update where they moved it to the footer and a bunch of people thought they'd removed it completely. It got lost when we had our skin overhaul but I've reinstated it under the Quick Links at the bottom of the board:
Guess who's finally old enough to sign up to itself? That's right Charming is 13 years old today! Officially a teenager! (Yeah I know we changed the age but the COPPA is still there okay? CHARMING CAN SIGN UP TO OTHER WEBSITES LEAVE ME ALONE I JUST WANTED TO BE WITTY!)
In celebration of this momentus occasion we will hopefully not be experiencing bad server attitude or bandwidth tantrums but there will some physical changes to observe. I can just tell this is going to be embarrassing if I read this back to myself later but there's enough alcohol left in me to forge ahead with minimal shame.
ANYWAY, PHYSICAL CHANGES! Yeah that means new skins. Two new skins, one of which is a new dark theme bringing the grand total to two!
So we have Oranges & Lemons as our new default - this one is an MJ creation and very warm and summery!
And Let the Dust Settle will keep you from reaching for your sunglasses if your eyes prefer darker color schemes - you can thank Gin for the delightfully brooding banner!
A couple more things this weekend...
![[Image: uXFA6jo.png]](https://i.imgur.com/uXFA6jo.png)
![[Image: TrSGeWR.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/TrSGeWR.jpg)
