We dun got blowed up!

[Cairenn]

As you know, we were down for a bit last night while Dolby moved us over to the recently purchased shiny new servers for our site. As you'll recall I also mentioned, Dolby turned to the gnome engineers for assistance in moving the site over. (The gnomes were really upset when we asked the goblins to help when we added the author portals to the site and not them).

Well, this did not go quite as planned. The gnomes decided that we needed to do some major renovations. Apparently they weren't quite gnomish engineers. They told us that they were actually gnomish "innovators", which apparently is a combination of engineer and artist. Or something like that. Anyway, yeah, well, they threw bombs at the site to "prove the purity and beauty of chaos in gnomish innovation". Now stuff is in all kinds of new places on the site. The gnomes say it's "gnomish art". I believe that is supposed to be something like "modern art", but I never really 'got' that, either, so /shrug. Dolby thinks we have it tidied up* enough to let people start using it again though, so we're giving it a shot.

You'll notice that the gnomes blew up almost all of our old site graphics, but we were able to recover a charred and blackened map of Azeroth, so we are using that as our header background now.

They bombed the "search" option into multiple pieces, so there is now a tab on the site that is only "Find", along with the usual search capabilities on the other pages.

The former front page of the site is now the "Community" tab, with the usual news, user menus, latest threads, latest mods, etc. but even there things aren't quite as they were. The left column got completely obliterated, so we had to move everything that had been in it to the right hand side. Some stuff landed on top of other things, too, so now there are tabs for Latest Update, Highest Rated, Most Favourites and Most Hits. As well, some of the most recent Author Portal information ended up on that page in addition to some of the RSS feeds being listed there.

The AddOns tab didn't escape from the onslaught either. Things are in slightly different places there as well. The individual AddOn pages got messed up in the process as well, but Dolby has cleaned it up pretty well.

The Portal tab still looks pretty much like it always did, but I have a feeling that some long term effects will likely show up on it at some point.

Luckily, the Forums tab somehow managed to avoid all of the damage and has remained basically as it was.

Because stuff ended up being rearranged so much, Dolby put an option on the User Control Panel for people to be able to set which tab they want as their default home page for the site. The "Find" tab is the default for new users to the site and anyone that isn't logged into an account. The "Community" tab is the default tab for users who are logged in. However, under your User CP you can set any of the tabs to be the default for your account. Finally, we've added an option at the very bottom to view the site in either a light (black text, light background) or dark (white text, dark background) format.

Hopefully the new servers will more than make up for the gnomes' *cough*help*cough*. We're really sorry for any inconvenience and hope you can enjoy our new look. Please feel free to give us feedback on the new layout.

[More]

* Please beware of falling masonry.

[Cairenn]

On an extremely serious note, due to the trojans that have been floating around as of late we have added MD5 hash to every file in our download database for added security. Whenever a mod is uploaded/updated on the site, a checksum is applied to it. Think of this as a unique id (or fingerprints) of each file. You can then compare the checksum of your downloaded file to the one listed on the download page for that file. More information about checksums can be found below, and also on the FAQ page of the site.

We've added some other things to the site and servers as well to help protect our users, but we don't need to tell the malicious programmers everything we've done to try to help thwart them.


MD5 Hash FAQ

* What is MD5 hash?

An MD5 hash is a complex calculation that turns any data (including a file) into a 128-bit ID composed of numerals and letters. This ID is seen as the “fingerprint” of the file, and is designed so that any change to a file will almost always result in a change to its hash. If any portion of the file changes, the MD5 hash will change, indicating that the fiel is not what it is anticipated to be. While MD5 hashes are not perfect, they are used because there are a wide variety of tools for verifying them. Because it is extremely hard to create a file with a specific hash, you’ll commonly see them used on other download sites to verify that the file you downloaded is the one that was expected. (Including being used by Blizzard on WoW patches).

* How does this help me?

If a file is somehow intercepted, you may actually be downloading malicious code instead of what you expected to be downloading. By verifying the MD5 hash before running or installing it, it is less likely that the program has been modified before you got it.

* Where can I find what the checksum (fingerprint) of my file is supposed to be?

You will find it on the download page, just under the "download now" button for the addon.

* How can I verify that mine matches?

For Windows users, there are hundreds of MD5 programs available; using Google will surely show up several programs that can be used to calculate the checksum. Just give it the file after you've downloaded it, and it will spit out a number that should match the one listed on our site (note that MD5 hashes are traditionally shown in hexadecimal, so this "number" will actually be composed of digits 0-9 AND A-F).

For Mac and *nix users, you will find an MD5-calculating program already on your computer. You can use the following command in the command line to check a MD5 hash:

md5sum -b [filename]

Where [filename] is the file in question.

* Do authors need to post what their checksum is, or will the site put that on the download page for us? (or, Do authors need to do anything special?)

The site will automatically calculate the MD5 checksum upon upload, so authors do not need to do anything more than they have already been doing.

[Syxx]

Wow! The site looks fantastic! Shiny!

[eiszeit]

I like this WoWI Layout much better than the old one..

[Dreadlorde]

Great new layout of awesomeness!

Too bad custom avatar's are still off

[Typh00n]

Nice, looks awesome! =D

[Gemini_II]

So far so good. Very shiny!

Some quick first impressions:

• Nice dark layout. Could use a few more colorful graphics, but otherwise pleasing to the eye.
• Dont know if I like the left column gone...
• MD5 Checksums are awesome!
• We still need more smilies... particularly an evil one...

Overall great job. Kudos to Cairenn, Dolby, and all the others!

PS: OH-NOES... where are our Signature options?!

[Dridzt]

I like it.

md5 hash verification is also a very welcome addition.

HashTab is a very convenient (free) extension for checking hashes on Windows (2000,XP,Vista)
as is the GPLed MD5summer (supports Win9x)

Then there's the command-line Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier

Any chance the md5 hash can be added as a separate download?
There's utilities (including many popular archivers) that will perform a md5 check
if they find an .md5 file in the same folder as the file to check with the same root name.
Eg.
MyCompilation.zip
MyCompilation.md5

It would make checking the download folder easier and maybe avoid some copy-paste user errors.

Overall...
/applaud

[flaicher]

The new layout is quite nice, but I'm so used to the old layout :\
It's all about getting used to I guess ^^

[Jesamyn]

Originally Posted by Gemini_II So far so good. Very shiny! [*]Dont know if I like the left column gone...

Ya know what's sad? I don't remember what was over there, it just looks 'weird' to me without it! I guess it's just an adjustment thing.

I like the overall look and layout. I do miss just clicking on the drop-down to serarch, but I can get over it.

[Cairenn]

Originally Posted by Jesamyn I do miss just clicking on the drop-down to serarch, but I can get over it.

The drop-down is still there on the Community, Addons, Portals and Forums tabs. Top right on the menu bar. It just isn't there on the Find tab, for obvious reasons.

[obsidianblack]

So are we going to be getting our signatures back, or are we just without them now??

[Cairenn]

Not sure why you are having a problem with your sig file, mine is working fine. Anyway, toss a message about it in the feedback thread, please, so Dolby can look into it.

[Ahm]

I'm loving the new layout.. not at all difficult to adjust to. However, the Light/Dark skins are a bit counter-productive.. what are people to do about posting with font colors? For instance, my addon uses color to separate sections and make things easier to read and find... the colors are all light so that it looks great in the dark skin, but it looks horrible and is hard to read in the light skin.

Also, granted, I'd likely set the skin once and leave it, but why is it only accessible from certain pages? Especially with the above problem, it'd be nice to have the option to switch skins on addon pages so we can see things in both lights.

Copied to Feedback thread

[Seerah]

Go ahead and put that into the feedback thread Cairenn linked above.

[Cairenn]

Thanks guys. We really do appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative. It's how we improve the site. And thank you for using the feedback thread, it makes it easier for us to find the problems if they are all in one spot.

[Fuzzywuzzy]

/me likes very much

[LittleWhiteDove]

Nice! Lots of hard work obviously but the results are great. Thanks to all of you for providing this site for our use.

[endx7]

I gotta say, I do like the new look. It looks...less cluttered.

[Esamynn]

Heh, nice news post.

"Artistic Gnomes" huh?