Complete patch notes: items and groups

Posted by Kim on November 17, 2014, 10:48am

Item & inventory updates

All users now have an inventory!
Added items to the site. Purchasing stuff from the store no longer results in a benefit being applied directly to your account. Instead, an item will be placed into your inventory. You may activate that item at your leisure, or give it to someone else.
You can give items from your inventory to other users, characters or groups. When sending items from your inventory, you can choose whether it appears to have been sent by you or one of your characters, and include a gift message.

On that note, added wrapping paper. Since you can now give other players gifts much more freely, this seemed like it could be useful and fun. It works like you think it works.
Added item display cases! If you don't want to use your object, you can display it proudly on your profile instead. (Groups can do this too, via the Display Case widget)
Some items can be used multiple times before they are used up. For example, an hourglass of epicness gives you 6 months of Epicness every time it is activated, and it can be used twice, for a total of a year of Epicness. This means that you can easily split the purchase between yourself and a friend, if that tickles your fancy!
Completely redesigned the store. Items are now sortable by category of benefit, and whether the item is intended for use by a user or by a group.
Clicking an item image or name in the store will give you a more detailed description of the item, so you can do your research before purchasing.
You can purchase items from the store for other users, characters or groups. The item will skip your inventory and be sent directly to theirs. No gift message is possible when sending items via the store.
Added inventory history, which keeps track of everything you have done with the items in your inventory to a nearly inane degree.
Epicness items intended for use by a user can still be used by groups -- their effectiveness is just halved. And vice versa.

Group updates

Groups can now be given Epic status!
Groups can purchase permanent extra page slots.
New group widget: Donate widget
New group widget: Display case widget (for showing off treasury items the group has opted not to make use of in the normal way, for whatever reason)
New group widget: Useful links (outputs appropriate toolbar links wherever. Like in the sidebar.)
Group pages can now have their visibility be restricted by role. A free group can choose for pages to be visible to everyone or to members only. An epic group can also choose visibility only for moderators, GMs or both.
Group forums are now set up to handle the same additional visibility options (GMs or Moderator permissions required, options available for epic groups).
Epic groups can now customize the sidebars for their forums, members, event and announcement pages.
The dreaded ads have been enabled in groups! Booo! Currently they are only in the footer of groups, and beneath first forum posts (as per usual). And as per usual, epic members don't see ads anywhere on the site, including in groups. Epic groups will not have ads anywhere on their profile.
Made group buttons a wee bit more visually active when the mouse hovers over them or they are tabbed to via the keyboard, just to make it clearer that they are clickable elements.
Group colors can now be used in the chat! This is epic-group only.
If for some reason you don't personaly like the group colors in the chat, you can override them per group in the chat's settings (green gear at the top right of the text input)
Groups now have treasuries that contain all of their items. The contents of a group treasury is visible to all group members.
Group treasuries have an accompanying treasury history, that keeps detailed records of everything that happens to the loot in the group treasury. These records are visible to all members of the group.
New settings page - Treasury settings, visible to founders only. Allows a founder to decide if any other member groups (such as moderators) are able to use, sell or give away the items in the treasury.
Added basic group statistics to group management overview page (the first page you see when you click the pencil to edit a group). Shows date the group was created, number of members, how much longer the group has epic status, and how many pages the group is allowed to create.
Re-organized top toolbar menu on group profiles, grouping related links into dropdowns. Added treasury link.
Removed restriction on "join" link in toolbar -- it will always appear for non-members, even if the group is invite-only. Clicking it in an invite-only group provides instructions for requesting an invite, so they don't just think the group is "broken" because they can't figure out how to immediately apply. The hope is that this will reduce confusion and erroneous bug reports.
Added buttons to group members page for related actions - Invite new members, review open aplications, Join/Apply with another character
Added founder-only button "retire as founder" to leave group page.
Added a notice to open applications, to show voters whether or not they had already voted on an app.
"Edit group" link in group toolbars now attempts to bring you to the relevant editing section, not just the edit overview/toolbox.
Fixed issue where comments on announcements were not properly deleted when the announcement itself was deleted.
Added better security filters for user-written CSS. This is in play for groups currently; it will be extended to character profile CSS soon.
CSS styles written for groups can import up to two google fonts from a list of about 75 choices.
New basic profile customization options for epic groups: Rounded corners, shiny buttons, and access to oodles of extra fonts.
Added more group font choice options, especially for Epic groups.
Changed icon for group "Pages" section.

Other random updates

Added a teaser image to news posts.
I made the chat settings checkboxes way easier to click. I know this is minor but I love convenience stuff like this so I wanted to tell you because YAY!
Fixed bug when deleting the first post of a topic -- topic author in forum did not update to be the name of the next existing poster.
Changed icon for character "Pages" section.
Removed "Power-Ups" link from the "Dashboard" sub-navigation.
Added "Your Inventory" link to the "Dashboard" sub-navigation.
Multiple security updates applied to the server
Rewrote a huge amount of code across many aspects of the site, mostly aimed at reducing lag. This is awesome but so much changed that it probably means I broke something. So, y'know, report everything that you find is wonky!