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What Weissreich says is true. It takes a good deal of time to recode things to suit the way that the forum accepts those settings, and I've just never gotten around to them. However, on the other hand it takes time to code new non-forum things into the forum admin panel, so you're kinda fucked either way.

I'll get around to moving those things in one of these days.

When you're on right when Wintermoot is creating the elections section... 

Improved Recruitment Filtering
Thanks to [violet] implementing my suggestion for the NationStates API to show whether a user has blocked recruitment telegrams, the recruitment page now filters out nations that have done so. According to my initial observations, this should remove upwards of 20 to 30 percent of nations that would have otherwise been on the page...nations that it would have been a waste of time to recruit to.

I am appreciative of [violet] implementing my suggestion. It should save manual and API recruiters here and everywhere a good bit of time going into the future.

Just as an update, it may interest some people to know that since this change was implemented almost three days ago, 1155 out of 6249 nations have been flagged as having blocked recruitment telegrams, or about 23%. This translates to a lot more nations our recruiters aren't wasting time on, and hopefully means that they will get more nations in the region with the same amount of effort.

Improved Recruitment Filtering
Thanks to [violet] implementing my suggestion for the NationStates API to show whether a user has blocked recruitment telegrams, the recruitment page now filters out nations that have done so. According to my initial observations, this should remove upwards of 20 to 30 percent of nations that would have otherwise been on the page...nations that it would have been a waste of time to recruit to.

I am appreciative of [violet] implementing my suggestion. It should save manual and API recruiters here and everywhere a good bit of time going into the future.

Oh Violet.  I remember when people were convinced that she was a bot.    Glad to see she took your suggestion and implemented it.  It'll save quite a lot of time for recruiters.

Monthly Activity
I've changed the overall activity section of the recruitment page to the monthly activity...it will show the number of nations that people have recruited during the current month, and will allow you to check up on the competition for the monthly contest more easily.

Besides, who really wanted to know that I've recruited 175k nations anyways?

Slight Forum Overhaul
I have slightly overhauled the forums. Werewolf and Minecraft have been granted their own main forums, and the two programming contest sub-forums have been merged and archived. Also, from this point forward, you may post topics about Wintreath gaming competitions and teams in the Gaming Lounge...I know there was a lot of confusion as to why those needed to be in the Amalyan Quarter before.

I plan on making additional changes to the forum soon, in order to make it easier to browse through and understand what each section is for, especially to those who are new to the forum.

Why was the Frostmist Arena abolished in the first place, again?

Why was the Frostmist Arena abolished in the first place, again?

Well, the only really active game within it outside of the Minecraft/Civ stuff was Werewolf.

Maybe once more forum games are running, it'll see a return. 

Also, people were confused between what went in the Arena and what went in the Amalyan Quarter, so they were merged together.

Profile Revamp Mockups
Because the future character and nation profiles will have to be listed somewhere, I've began the work of revamping profiles (again). For now, the changes are only on my profile, which you can view here. As you can tell, there's still some polishing to do before releasing them to everyone.

The biggest addition is probably the tile-ribbon, a row of tiles that makes basic stats about a person easy to see and understand. I envision character and user profiles also having a tile-ribbon, except that their stats will be things relevant to the nation or character instead of the user. The photo (photos didn't look good as tiles, unfortunately), contact list, and actions have been merged and moved to the right of the page, which will also be where nation and character profiles are listed in the future. In character and nation profiles, I imagine that this could either be a place to highlight additional facts and figures (like on many Wikipedia pages) or something that people could code into their profiles, as you can code in things like this on NS dispatches and such. A lot of those decisions will depend on the outcome of the nation and character profile discussion I linked above.

The profile status has been moved to the bottom as well. There's a reason for this, but that's for a far-future update, I'm afraid. In the meantime, if you would like to try out the new profile format, let me know here and I'll adjust the code to include you.

Since nobody offered, I drafted the ten people with the most posts besides me into new profiles, and fixed a few of the issues with them.

Oh, I didn't see the call for volunteers. I'd be happy to see what the new profiles are like.

If you're adding a new round of testers sign me up too.

Added!

Profile Contacts Overhaul
Profile contacts are the next area to get an overhaul...not only do they look different, you can now add a contact for any service or website instead of just Steam or Skype. You will notice on your update contact page that you can now specify the name of the service or website, your account name, and a URL for the contact if one is applicable. If it is, your account name will appear as a link that people can click to go to it. If you do not specify a URL, it will just show the account name with no link.