Lots of little updates that have been waiting too long!

Some minor bug fixes:

• display an image for the missing avatars, rather than an empty space;
• fix display bugs on Microsoft Edge (I recommend to use another browser);
• fix display bugs on Microsoft Internet Explorer (j'implore to prefer another browser as soon as possible, it is old, not updated anymore, and sooner or later will not be supported anymore);
• correction of the display of rankings and points, especially on phone for those who used Samsung's default browser;
• correction of the pagination, which had been broken;

Other things implemented, not visible for you:

• work to reduce the number of query errors;
• cleaning up a variety of different codes.

I still have (very... ) many bugs in my mailbox, more or less difficult to fix.
Thanks for your patience and see you soon!

Good evening everyone,

I just spent three days of intense work to reprogram the text editor that allows you to easily insert BBcode.

It acts the removal of the visual text editor, which allowed to see the rendering in real time. This decision was not easy, and I want to explain it to you! This visual text editor was an element that was dear to me during the conception of the site and that had required a lot of work: encountering a lot of problems after the opening, I had then completely redone it with another system, again with a lot of sweat. It remained full of bugs, extremely complex under the hood (nearly 70,000 lines of code were removed!), full of bugs on many platforms, I was getting at least one owl on it every week. Already difficult to maintain, the underlying library hasn't been updated for three years and was starting to have additional bugs with recent browsers... while only 10% of the players were using it. The game was no longer worth it. A big sorry for those who were fond of this feature Feel free to use the preview !

The new editor is meant to be as simple as possible, and more airy. It allows you to choose any color (behave yourself) and displays a larger space to see the smileys. There are no more unreadable drop-down menus like before. I hope you like it. I'll be adding some tooltips to it soon. Your suggestions and feedback are welcome!

A day entirely devoted to the text editor today:

• I've added small explanatory tooltips to the toolbar buttons ;
• I also added keyboard shortcuts for the most useful functions: bold (b), italics (i) and underlining (u) can be directly invoked by pressing [alt] or [shift]+[alt] at the same time as the letter, depending on the browser; I was not able to use [ctrl] because this may be incompatible with existing shortcuts on some browsers (in particular [ctrl+b] which loads bookmarks);
• when adding links, the button now proposes to enter the URL;
• I have provided a color palette, the default browser color selection tool being impractical on some systems;
• fixed text size selector that wasn't working yesterday;
• it now works on Internet Explorer (even if you would be happier on another browser)!
• I repaired the word counter, indispensable ;
• removal of an unwanted blue halo on macOS and iOS.

I remain at your disposal if you need me

I just added 14 new smileys that might have been missing (or not!) for your messages. I don't add them too often, because it requires to cut them out again (frame after frame for the animated ones) to have a nice transparency. I hope you'll like them:

Lots of little things in the last few days that have been on my to-do list for a long time:

• when editing a post, little warning at the top of the page, to avoid mistakes (especially a moderator who would edit a post when he wanted to quote it!);
• when writing a message, a little "subtitle" when you preview a message to distinguish the parts;
• in the homeworks, I fixed a display glitch (for the students as for the teachers);
• teachers now have an edit bar for bbcode when correcting;
• a better display of messages on the phone, which before could show a large empty part;
• a slightly prettier password request when you want to access a password-protected forum;
• when displaying forums or topics, adding small tooltips if you leave the mouse on the buttons at the top and bottom of the pages (subscribe, add to favorites...) because it's not always clear!
• the Butterbeer is moved to the "Food" section of the trunk, because of its recognized nutritional qualities ;
• I put back the link back to the forum in the shops, which had disappeared;
• small keyboard shortcuts in the bbcode bar now allow, with c and s, to display the color palette or the list of smileys (for windows or for mac : please see the "accesskey" of your browser).

In the "under the hood" part, I also made big rewrites :

• rewriting of several thousands of lines, that I partly automated, to convert the templates that generate the rendering of the site in a new format;
• complete rewriting of the display of the avatars which avoids many duplicates in the code; this also allows to standardize the display of the avatars (or their absence) in the different parts of the site.

A big thank you to all those who report bugs or suggest their ideas.

Please, if you notice a bug or if you have a suggestion, don't hesitate (especially since with the confinement, I have more time !)

Several days of tweaks have been completed to have a solid and efficient server! This one keeps all its promises in terms of speed and load capacity. I think we can go a long way with it ! For more information, you can go here.

To help your professors who are faced with a very large amount of homework, the grading system has been improved, with a stack and a lock system, and a whole bunch of practical / less painful little things that have been suggested to me.

Small birds have appeared on the home page of the site when you are logged out. I plan to continue to make some changes to it soon, to make the site a little more lively.

I have added a small arrow on topics that have been moved to another forum, but of which there is still a redirection.

Finally, invisibly, various code cleanups and optimizations to lighten the pages!

Last remark: I reviewed the counters of the number of users online in the Entrance Hall. They are now limited to people online during the last 10 minutes (against 15 before) and especially excluded the offline users, especially the indexing robots, which could be very numerous. So, don't be surprised if the numbers are significantly reduced: they are closer to reality!

I also spent a whole day reprogramming many parts of the site and setting up a whole sub-domain system in the hope of having a faster outside Europe, but it didn't work, I did everything for nothing and I had to undo it for a large part of the afternoon so I wanted to tell you about it here anyway because I often spend hours on something that's a complete waste, and then you don't see anything. Kind of like the flying Ford Anglia that I wanted to do with the birds on the homepage, for four or five hours, before I gave up because it makes you feel bad. If you've read me so far, click here to get 50 Galleons. No, there's actually no link here, what did you think?

Hello to all,


First of all, I wish you all a very happy new year!

I'm taking advantage of my first vacations for a long time to get busy with my favorite occupation, and I have a few new things to present to you.



I made several changes to simplify the navigation on the site.

To illustrate the problem I tried to solve, to get from your dormitory to the stadium's dressing room of Quidditch, it was necessary until today :

1. move your cursor to the top right to display the menu ; (or save time by going through the links at the bottom of the page, not made for that) ;
2. click on "back";
3. move your cursor back to the top right to display the menu again;
4. scroll to find the park;
5. arrive on an empty page, move your cursor back to the top right to display the menu;
6. click on the Quidditch stage;
7. click on your locker room, elsewhere on the page.

Not only was this confusing to newcomers (for whom the common rooms might seem empty), it also made it difficult to be aware of the existence of the sub-forums unless you tried each of the locations.

Thus, the main menu at the top left has evolved:

• it now displays directly the sub-forums and sub-sub-forums (outside the archives, and only those you have access to) ;
• this menu is now the same throughout Hogwarts (including the ground and houses), to avoid multiple clicks with empty pages;
• the door/paint animation is put on each time you enter your house, to keep the cozy effect of the houses.

Moreover, I have reviewed the display of the subforums in the forums: I made a first try by displaying them with the topics, but I came back from it: they were too indistinguishable. As a result, we keep buttons :

• the navigation button is placed after the navigation button to create a new subject (like links to the shops or the classrooms);
• the "back" button now indicates the name of the destination forum;
• if there are several sub-locations, only one button appears so as not to take up too much space, with a drop-down menu to choose from.
  /list]

Another change I wanted to make concerns the icons in the forums: I found it difficult to distinguish between announcements (which remain on all pages), posts-its (which remain at the top of the first page) and normal messages, which are sometimes hard to distinguish where they start.

Now, all the announcements have a single megaphone icon, just like the posts-its all have a thumbtack icon.

In addition, a small horizontal bar now separates pinned topics from others.


Finally, several minor modifications (minor for you, sometimes they took time!) have been made :

• fix the possibility to disable the animations of the site in the profile, which allows, for older computers, to save battery power or just because it annoys you, to remove all animations (snow, envelope, reminder everything, parallax effects ...) ;
• the numbered lists in the messages are now indented like the unnumbered ones;
• display of the time of the last message and its author on the phone in the pages accessible from the links at the bottom of the site ("unread messages", "my messages", "my PR", drafts, favorites...). Until now, this information was only visible on computer. It remains limited by the width of your screen;
  *] better display of the bar at the bottom of the page on smaller phones;
• I removed a bug that prevented the correction of homework when a subject has no teacher;
• better display of some drop-down menus, especially regarding moderation;
• the maximum number of items that can be resold or deleted in the trunk has been increased to 1000.
• correction of typos in chocolate frog cards;
• fixed line breaks in bbcode "code" blocks.

Thank you all for reading me so far!

Some small additions today:

• the navigation between your profile and its edition is now simpler (I've been wanting to improve this for a long time);
• the remembrall has been a bit reworked to be more readable, and the notification settings are now in it;
• a nice new feature, related to your registration date, which you'll probably notice soon ;
• the format of dates has been revised to take less space (the months have been shortened);
• the number of boxes that can be created in the owlery is no longer limited; (so in fact, technically, it is limited to 9999, but if you do the same, you have to go to the doctor).[/size}

In addition to the updates on the search, here are some new features since yesterday:

Let's start with the owlery:

• as soon as you start typing the recipient's name, a small drop-down menu now offers you the corresponding users, which allows you to go much faster (and not to have to open the address book): it only works with the first name (you can't start typing the last name);

In the address book :

• the same dropdown menu for the search ;
• better display of the group selector in the address book;
• improvement of the speed of the search engine;
• correction of the display of names with apostrophes.

In the profiles :

• possibility to indicate the birthday of his character in the identity card;
• correction of a small graphic bug at the bottom of the identity cards.

Finally, a few minor modifications :

• I corrected the dropdown menu for subforums that could stay open unintentionally;
• colors and shape of this menu a little revised;
• corrected a bug that could generate a page not found when you want to go to the encyclopedia.

Here are some additions from the morning:

• I added a "quick reply" tool at the end of each topic, to save you a click and a page load; this one only appears at the last page (which allows you to avoid posting by mistake without seeing that there was an unread page left); I tried to make it not to be too confused with the rest of the messages, with a small separator and the no name or avatar;
• the edit bar has been completed with smileys for writing and correcting assignments (this is not an invitation to post smileys everywhere, but rather a measure of homogeneity!) ;
• correction of display problems in topics that could occur when student avatars and functions were too long, and exceeded the length of the posts.

I take this opportunity to invite you, without any hesitation, to report any bug or more widely any small detail that annoys you and any suggestion : for bugs, most of the time, I don't see them myself as I'm not an active user; for the rest, I'm here to try to make your use of the site as comfortable as possible