With just three staff members left and fear that I would have been forced to take a hiatus in a few months, the only way to continue keeping the website alive was to process into a restructure of our staff system. When I ran Omnimaga (which I founded in 2001), the main staff had some activity requirements to meet in order to ensure that we can maintain the website adequatly and keep its activity steady. That idea was transplanted into CodeWalrus when I co-founded it in October 2014. However, the TI community has mutated over the years, with changes in people's habits and priorities, reducing the amount of people who could contribute full time. In addition to that, some people might not necessarily feel comfortable with too many staff privileges. But then, what if those people still wanted to give us an hand?
This is why we are pleased to announce the introduction of a new staff group called Part-time maintenance and a position called Topic management! With the addition of the Part-time maintenance group, Streetwalrus is now able to stay in the team, at the server maintenance position! Besides those changes, Juju is now in charge of site funding. I am also now part of the Topic management group, although all its permissions are already available in the Forum maintenance group by default.Now for the site itself, there have been quite a lot of updates since last week's events:Quote-There is now a forum navigation on the site front page portal, so you can access your favorite sub-forums faster! Thanks to SiNaN from SimplePortal website, this navigation is dynamic, so it will update itself automatically!
-When you register a new account, you can now directly choose to subscribe or unsubscribe from e-mail announcements and updates.
-It is now possible to switch between WIRC and OmnomIRC at will via your profile. Just join or leave the new group called "OmnomIRC mode" via the Group Memberships option and you're set. As always, you can also turn both off entirely by joining the "Disabled shoutbox mode" usergroup. #CodeWalrus is also reachable via EFnet, Omninet or Freenode as always.
-It is now possible to view all attachments of a topic in one page, via a topic list link or a topic view link at the bottom of the discussion.
-The forum rules now includes "disruptive behavior" as punishable offense, under rule #6
-The CodeWalrus store has been discontinued, as I am now out of the music business. The music link is now available as a new Downloads sub-menu in the top navigation bar and my entire discography will be available for free (without the bonus tracks) starting March 15th. This also ends the "My Little Activity: Posting is Music" promotion, which lasted for 2 years.
-The thrash bin sub-forum (where deleted posts land by default) is now visible to all members that have at least 1 post.
-You can now add your calculator collection above your signature (it doesn't take much space, especially now that CSS has been edited to shrink down signature size). Go to your profile to edit it.
And finally, we are working on our first newsletter, which will be sent via e-mail soon for those who have them enabled. The CodeWalrus newsletter will have an edition at the end of Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall and summarize major site events, updates and member projects and releases. Another surprise is coming soon as well.Happy codewalrifying and thanks for the support!
