Hello Everyone,

Now that we’ve successfully switched from WeBBSpace to Exodus, I’ve noticed a lot of people are running into the same issues all at once. This is primarily my fault, because there are some parts of the new system that weren’t very clearly explained by me to… well… anyone. So I just wanted to address those things right now, briefly, so that you guys know about them and can adapt accordingly.

Markdown Formatting

A lot of people have asked about how to do formatting of various things. We’re going to include a specific-to-our-site syntax guide in an update to the site we’ll be making soon. But, the “official” guide to markdown syntax is here: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

The only thing we don’t allow at present from that syntax are headers and images. We can probably add headers if people want them. Also, valid HTML tags are also valid Markdown syntax. We support the following HTML tags: ‘br’, ‘p’, ‘a’, ‘abbr’, ‘b’, ‘blockquote’, ‘code’, ‘em’, ‘i’, ‘strong’, ‘table’, ‘thead’, ‘th’, ‘tbody’, ‘tr’, ‘td’, ‘li’, ‘ol’, ‘ul’, ‘u’, ‘hr’

If there’s a demand for more tags or formatting things, you’re free to ask us about it and we’ll think over. We’re also aware that some of the behavior with the single asterisks is quirky in that it seems to add emphasis also; we’re investigating that at present.

Fleet Admin

One of the last minute changes during the Beta was to remove the Site Admin link for all members with “Staff” permission, because we found out from testers that not all of the rules that hide things from privileged users were working properly. As a result, this left Fleet Commanders and Assistant Fleet Commanders with no way to edit their MOTDs or use the new Fleet Admin features.

On Sunday, I put out a patch so that anyone who is in the Cabinet can now see an “Administer this Fleet” link on any Fleet MOTD. It was a very quick and dirty patch because I wanted to be sure everyone would be ready to do reports on time. If you’re a Fleet Commander or Assistant Fleet Commander and don’t see this link, please file a ticket on the issue tracker so that we can adjust your access permissions.

MOTD Links

It apparently wasn’t made entirely clear that TECH was only editing MOTDs for basic compatibility with Exodus, and not for accurate content. This means a lot of MOTDs have incorrect links on them that refer to parts of the old system. Here’s a list of the most common things that don’t appear to be working, and what they should be instead:

• Any link containing ‘/webb/’ in it. These refer to parts of WeBBSpace, aka Drupal. No links containing this path will work. In a future release we will probably put the WeBBSpace archive at this URL, but for now absolutely nothing is there that is available.
• “Read Notes” links. The old Read Notes links have ‘/webb/’ in them and therefore don’t work. The new “Read Notes” paths are all of the following form: “/core/{fleet}/{ship}/notes”, e.g. https://www.star-fleet.com/core/stf1/asimov/notes for the Asimov in the Foremost Fleet.
• “Post Notes” links. These now take the form of “/core/{fleet}/{ship}/notes/add”.
  *”Master Roster” links. The old Master Roster at https://www.star-fleet.com/id/rosters is no longer reflective of current reality, and will soon be removed from public view. The link to the new Master Roster is available in the Resources menu on every page, and is: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/rosters/
• “Captain’s Log” links. The Captain’s Log was not included in Exodus because there was little-to-no interest expressed on the part of the membership for this functionality. There’s no plan to bring them back at present.
• “Submit Report” links. Exodus has a new reporting system. If you wish to submit a report of any kind, the link to use now is https://www.star-fleet.com/reports/submit/. Access to the reporting system is limited to COs, XOs, GMs, FComms, and AFComms, and each member is presented with a personalized list of things to submit every month depending on what positions they hold. That requires that Fleets be set up properly with that information (we’re still in the middle of doing that).

Contact Form Replies

Finally, emails from the contact form currently come from an address called “do-not-reply@star-fleet.com”. Despite this name, you actually can reply to these emails and they should go to the email address of the member who sent you a message through the form. We’re changing the name of this address to something else soon so as not to be confusing.

Anyway that’s all I can think of for right now about what you may need to know immediately. Later this week I intend to write a bit more about what our future plans are for additional development, because we have a lot of them and we’re going to be moving a lot faster now that we have Exodus on our real server and we’re all really using it for real.

Joe