[April Fools] Introducing WesGold™ Forum Accounts

[Iris]

Posted on April 1 2014

Greetings, forum users!

The first version of Battle for Wesnoth was first released to the public in July 2003. Since then, the game and the community around it have grown far beyond anyone’s original expectations. We are committed to providing you with the best Free (as in speech) gaming experience, and in order to best serve the community’s evolving needs, we continuously seek new ways to improve our existing infrastructure.

In an ideal world, we would be able to provide you with these services without charging you a single cent. However, the reality is that our current hardware platform can no longer sustain the community at its current growth rate, and as you may know, hosting large public servers is expensive. As game developers and players ourselves, we would never consider moving to a “free-to-play” or “freemium” model, and closing our doors to our existing players is definitely out of the question. For these reasons, the Wesnoth.org administration and our community management team have worked hard — with the collaboration of our Forum Moderators — on devising a middle-ground alternative which we are sure will prove useful to the community by promoting intelligent and hassle-free communication.

We are proud to announce the launch of the WesGold™ Forum Accounts program! This initiative will enable users of our Wesnoth.org forums board to access new highly-requested features intended for bettering your overall forum experience for an affordable monthly fee of USD 10.00. These are the benefits for WesGold ™ users:

• Color formatting in posts and signatures!
• Increased signature size limits up to 1000 characters and 10 lines!
• Animated avatars up to 1 MiB/200x200 in size!
• New BBCodes!
• The ability to lock, unlock, and delete their own forum threads, even after others have posted in them!
• Unlimited thread resurrections in all forum sections, even if they are not the thread’s author!
• Advanced post search options powered by Google’s Enterprise Search platform!
• Full WML validation and syntax highlighting in posts!
• One-click integration with social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Windows, and more!
• A more dynamic forum experience leveraging the power of HTML5, CSS3, and AJAX!

Have you been unjustly banned by a moderator? You no longer have a reason to worry if you are (or become) a WesGold ™ user! For an additional one-time fee of USD 50.00, you may ask to be instantly unbanned any number of times you wish, without having to email the administration a lengthy and potentially embarrassing appeal letter!

WesGold ™ users will also be able to use these new WesGold™-only BBCodes in posts and signatures:

• Table formatting tags: table, row, header, cell
• Social media tags: youtube, soundcloud, twitter, imgur (more to come!)
• A powerful html tag for including your own HTML code in posts!
  Includes automatic server-side analysis during submission to prevent exploits. Forum posts found to contain exploits will result in immediate rejection of the post, revocation of WesGold™ privileges, and permanent banning of the authoring account, as well as an instant notification to our field agents and legal representatives around the world.
• More to come!

These features will be gradually rolled out to current regular users for a free trial during the following 30 days before WesGold™ subscriptions become mandatory for using them. Forum users may purchase WesGold™ subscriptions any time they wish, even before the trial is over. WesGold™ subscriptions will be used to finance our operations including the addition of new exciting features for everyone (including non-WesGold™ users) in 1.14 such as cloud storage for Wesnoth saved games (including forum integration), multiplayer voice chat, HTML5-based Web browser integration, in-game video capture and editing, and the upcoming Windows 8 Modern UI port.

The WesGold™ subscription platform will be fully operational within the next 24 hours. This announcement will be updated accordingly once WesGold™ subscriptions are open to public.

We want to hear your feedback! You may post your thoughts and ideas to this thread for other cool additions you might want to see in the future for WesGold™ users.

Regards


WesGold™ and WesGold™ Forum Accounts program are trademarks or registered trademarks of Weldyn Industries Inc. in the U.S. This post is Copyright © 2005-2014 by Weldyn Industries Inc. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution of this post is allowed without prior written permission.

[Lorbi]

our field agents [...] around the world.

[Ishayahu]

It would be great, if WesGold could give suggestions about adding new features

[Dugi]

Color formatting in posts

I don't get it why would I need WesGold for that. Or it will be disallowed for common forum users later, because April 1st isn't the best day to disallow stuff?

[Crendgrim]

[lipk]

You may post your thoughts and ideas to this thread for other cool additions you might want to see in the future for WesGold™ users.

Automatic download count increase for my addons!

[Dunno]

Holy crap, unlimited thread necromancy? I'm in!

[Sapient]

To coincide with this announcement, I've been developing the crypto-currency that can only be mined by completing scenarios of official Wesnoth campaigns.

For a limited time, I will offer 4.1 free Wesbucks ™ crypto-currency to the first people who sign up for WesGold ™ forum accounts.

(By the way, I still need a good coin graphic for it!)

I am also excited to announce that as part of our promotion, celebrity rapper will.i.am has vowed to do nothing but play wesnoth campaigns for 120 consecutive hours in an effort to amass 4 billion Wesbucks ™!

[Paulomat4]

Will I be able to pay for my WesGold account with Wesbucks?

[Iris]

Will I be able to pay for my WesGold account with Wesbucks?

As soon as our finances department figures out how this cryptocurrency stuff works, sure!

Spoiler:

Just note that once the new Posting Guidelines come into effect tomorrow, misusing the WesGold™ and Wesbucks™ brands (in particular, failing to respect capitalization, bolding, using a color other than RGB #FFBB00, or forgetting the ™ mark) will result in a permanent ban. International regulations require us to protect and enforce our trademarks, you see.

[Mabuse]

finally.

may i ask if there are also forum-titles to buy -

lets say "developer h.c." in red letters, for example

[Svistwarrior273]

It's also possible to pay with bottles containing certain liquid instead of money? I promise, they're more than worthy!
I'm interested in anti-ban feature, not in wezgold or whatever it is, by the way.

[Iris]

Unfortunately, legal issues coupled with a perceived overall lack of interest have forced us to disband the WesGold™ working team and cancel the program.

For this reason, the tables feature, which was the first to be deployed yesterday (the first day of April), is going to be retired at the end of the week.

This is just a taste of the cool and awesome stuff you chose to not finance, people:

wesnoth-forums-table-test.png (8.83 KiB) Viewed 15504 times

Code: Select all

[table][row][header]Release[/header][header]Tagging date[/header][/row]
[row][cell]1.11.12 (1.12 beta 3)[/cell][cell]Sun Mar 23 19:42:47 2014 +0100[/cell][/row]
[row][cell]1.11.11 (1.12 beta 2)[/cell][cell]Sun Mar 2 19:33:15 2014 +0100[/cell][/row]
[row][cell]1.11.10 (1.12 beta 1)[/cell][cell]Sat Feb 22 14:44:56 2014 +0100[/cell][/row][/table]

(Click on the Quote button to take a look at the BBCode.)
UPDATE 2014-04-07: Feature dropped as announced above.

Spoiler:

Okay folks, the joke is over.

Several-table related BBCodes are now available for a yet-to-be-determined amount of time. The generated HTML is not conforming to either HTML 4.01 or HTML 5 because phpBB sucks and insists on inserting extraneous <br> elements in the middle of the table unless (presumably) you keep the whole table BBCode sequence in a single line. For this reason, the code requires a nasty CSS line-height hack to conceal the <br> elements in browsers that actually try to interpret them (for example, Firefox’s HTML parser moves them from the enclosing <table> and <tr> nodes to the parent node of the <table>). For this reason, the odds that the current implementation will persist after this special occasion are pretty low.

[Anonymissimus]

I was wondering about how you would go about implementing the wml syntax check. Integration of wmllint, emacs mode, the preprocessor, somehow ? But till then you actually got me. Some points need to be valid, costs of running the MP server and so on.

[HomerJ]

Darn, how could I miss it this year?

Greetz
HomerJ