Happy belated New Year Uboachan! And also, happy belated Birthday!

It may not look like much yet, but the staff have been busy devising new ways to make Uboachan great again this year. This has included subtle changes to the board rules, and reenvisioning of the policies by which the moderation staff operate. And behind the scenes, we've been working on bugfixes and new software to help us battle the rising tides of CP spam. Some shitty pedo won't be the death of us, and neither will negativity or bad vibes. We're stepping up our game in the background to clean this place up.

First off, the wordings of the rules have been altered to reflect a major change in the goals of the moderation staff. We're going to be tougher on shitposting this year. Let this be a warning: destructive posters and poisonous sentiments will be leeched from Uboachan like venom from a wound. If you are a total dickwad, you will first be warned generously to clean up your act, and then you will be banned. Let's all take this opportunity to be awesome and helpful people – the kind of people who build up a community rather than tearing it down. We could use some community-building right about now.

The CP spam remains a problem this year, but we've got people working behind the scenes to make the spammer's job harder. Every new countermeasure we develop incites an almost immediate change in the way the bot operates to nullify that countermeasure. We are being watched, so we're going to watch right back. Please welcome Jove, our new Janitor and Countermeasures Developer, who has been writing us software to help the board and the staff do their jobs more quickly and efficiently. Among these new developments is a bot that notifies the staff of new posts and suspected floods. We'll also be hiring additional Janitors to help us out! If you'd like to help us keep Uboachan clean of spam, shoot me an email at seisatsu@uboachan.net and tell me why you would be a valuable addition to the team.

And last on the docket, we've got way too many boards! It's not my fault, I didn't do it, it was like this when I got here. :(

We're finally going to be working on merging and restructuring boards. Don't worry, the staff will be accepting requests to move threads from retired boards to their new and consolidated replacements so that good content isn't buried and lost. And of course, we will be relying on input from the userbase during this process to ensure that existing board communities are preserved throughout these changes. This is going to include a major change to /n/, which will be revealed shortly.

Stay tuned, play nice, and have fun. I love you guys.
- Seisatsu

Sup guys. Don't adjust your television set, I've got a few orders of business to tell you about, and they're kind of important. It's really long winded this time so bear with me here.

First off, my long-time roommate and several year veteran Uboachan poster Izumi was just given moderator powers a few days ago, and is now getting situated. It's a bit unusual for a user to be promoted directly to Moderator status without being a Janitor first, but I need some more direct help running the site, and I feel that living together with someone else on the staff will give me a partner to collaborate with on a day-to-day basis if need be. It's really nice to have another person here in my house who's been active on Uboachan longer than I've been running the place, and I hope that it will help us communicate better with the entire staff team if we go at running things together. The staff list in the FAQ is also up to date again.

I'm sure everyone's noticed the annoying CP spam that's been constantly appearing on the boards. Bit of bad news here. I've tried setting up countermeasures such as phrase filters to automatically block posts, but as soon as I set them up, the bot changed tactics and stopped duplicating phrases between posts or leaving links in the post body. Unfortunately, this is a confirmation of our worst fear regarding these spam waves: they're only partially automated. An actual living and breathing pedo scumbag is behind the scenes, willfully and actively adjusting the bot's parameters to break through our security measures every time we update them. Not even captchas will stop a human. There is literally no way to stop the spam, and there never will be, and it will probably never go away until the person responsible is tracked down and arrested. Most likely they're in another country and this will never ever happen. All we can do is hire more Janitors to try and keep on top of them and hope they give up eventually. Sorry guys, I know it sucks but there's nothing I can realistically do here except ramp up our cleanup efforts. Though, if any of you have any novel ideas, please find and post in the relevant thread in /sugg/. I'd be happy to hear some fresh thoughts.

Further compounding the above issue is a weird bug we've nicknamed the "Ghost Thread Bug", which prevents threads from dying properly when a staff member deletes them. Deleting the thread deletes the image and makes the thread page 404, but a shadow thread remains on the board index and won't go away until someone else posts in the board or an administrator manually rebuilds the index. This is a huge pain in the ass and leaves garbage everywhere each time we clean up a spam wave. I've tried a couple things to fix it but they didn't work, and what's more the thread deletion code looks correct and I can't figure out why it isn't working. Even worse still, the maintainer for our software has basically retired and I don't have the skills anymore to track down the glitch in the codebase. If anyone here is competent at PHP debugging, please email me and I'll set you to work tracking this thing down. (My email address is in the FAQ.)

On a lighter note, I recently found out that the Oekaki module has been broken for at least a month. Oops. We needed some configuration changes to support a new version that was updated in some time ago, which have now been added, so it should work again. Go play around and help me test it here: https://uboachan.net/test/res/159.html

Also, for any Uboachanners on the west coast US, I'm going to be departing northbound on a road trip from Willits, California on the 23rd of this month with Izumi and a few other friends and settling in Bremerton, Washington for ~10 days before we turn around and head back to Sacramento. I can't stop to meet anyone on the way up, but I may be able to stop for short hangouts on the way back south, depending on how things turn out. If you'll be in Bremerton from the 24th of November to the 3rd of December, or somewhere along the route back to Sacramento around the 3rd, or if you live in my general Sacramento area, email me some time! I love offline meets. Again my email address is in the FAQ.

That's all for this time. This is a big news post, so I might make some edits in the next couple days, in which case I'll note it at the bottom here. Thanks for reading!

Comments go here: https://uboachan.net/sugg/res/2560.html

Over the past few months, several new features were added to Uboachan, which I'll enumerate here for those of you who missed the magic.

* Upgrade to Vichan board software (active fork of now defunct Tinyboard)
* Catalogs for each board
* "Last 50 Posts" link for large threads
* Public search function in the sidebar and board list
* Ban appeals for bans longer than 6 hours
* Webm upload support
* Post citation backlinks
* Automatic thread updating to show new posts as they happen without refreshing the page
* Oekaki on all boards
* Drag and drop image upload interface
* Up to four images allowed per post
* Remote images allowed
* Forced HTTPS encryption for all visitors
* Return of the /comp/ board
* A new public recent posts interface at /recent/
* 15 recent posts showed on news page (previously 10)

Keep an eye on the blotter at the top of the boards, where new features and small changes to the site are announced as they are implemented.

In addition, yesterday we traded banners and affiliated with Lainchan.org, a cyberpunk imageboard. Check them out, they're super cool guys; also take a look at the affiliates section of the sidebar and show our other sister sites some love.

For those of you who haven't heard, Praesul, one of our longest standing Administrators, recently retired. This left Writer to run administration on his own. To fill the gap, Mannosuke was elected to join the Administration staff alongside Writer.

In addition, Shadows and Maidnaut have been promoted from the Janitor staff and given a chance at moderation. Please welcome our staff members to their new positions!

A current list of staff members is available in the FAQ. Janitor applications may be opening soon, stay tuned!

Today, we finally dropped our crusty old Tinyboard software off a cliff. We are now running Vichan, a drop-in fork of Tinyboard. Unlike Tinyboard, Vichan is regularly maintained, and also offers us several new goodies right off the bat.

Here's a few new features we've gained:
* The board catalogs now integrate properly with the site style.
* There is a "Last 50 Posts" link next to the "Reply" link on large threads.
* There is a public post search function, linked from the sidebar and the board list.
* Users can now submit an appeal for bans longer than 6 hours using a built-in interface.

Please note that the Yotsuba theme isn't working properly with the sidebar; this should be a quick and easy fix. Everything else seems to be working perfectly after just a few minutes of tweaks. There may be bugs that we haven't noticed yet though, so if you find a bug, make sure to report it in /sugg/. You may experience a few glitches until you clear your cache or restart your browser, so try this first.

Happy posting!

Vichan: https://int.vichan.net/devel/