Smaller Metal Storm updates announcement thread

I decided to create a single thread for smaller announcements that don't fit anywhere else.

I made some modifications to the forum search display over the past few days. Those of you using New posts as your gateway to the forums will likely have noticed already.

There are now buttons to both copy a permalink, and visit the post. I also display the time of a post now and the board of the thread that was posted in.
I also tweaked the layout of post headers a little to make them more easily accessible on mobile.

As usual, feedback my way

Forum search now also displays existing thumbs up on a post for easier access to that information and consistency with how posts are displayed in the forums.

Written by corrupt on 13.04.2024 at 13:03

I also display the time of a post now and the board board of the thread that was posted in.
I also tweaked the layout of post headers a little to make them more easily accessible on mobile

That is really helpful-- big thumbs up here

Written by corrupt on 13.04.2024 at 13:03

I made some modifications to the forum search display over the past few days. Those of you using New posts as your gateway to the forums will likely have noticed already.

There are now buttons to both copy a permalink, and visit the post. I also display the time of a post now and the board board of the thread that was posted in.
I also tweaked the layout of post headers a little to make them more easily accessible on mobile.

As usual, feedback my way

I love the changes! Thank you for all the improvements!

The site will now return you to your post after editing and show your new post after posting instead of returning to the top of the page.

Cool to see when add or edit album we have month written as January, February ,. not 01. , 02. as we had before
Helps a lot do many edits at same time , working on database add albums

Written by Bad English on 15.04.2024 at 11:39
Cool to see when add or edit album we have month written as January, February ,. not 01. , 02. as we had before
Helps a lot do many edits at same time , working on database add albums

You can thank Starvynth for that. He literally phoned this one in last night.

Rate limiting is now set to 30 pages per minute, up from the previous 15.

Removing the display of users' countries from forum posts as this info is available in the popups now and I want to draw less attention to nationality.

I consider this an experiment. I want to unify what is displayed and reduce it to what is necessary information. In that vein, I added the position of anyone staff or staff-adjacent in forum cards. Also an experiment that I haven't cleared with the rest of staff. So maybe I'll be forced to remove that one if people feel unfomfortable ^^

Thing is, our mods and other staff are frequently insulted by people they reprimand. I'm hoping that displaying their position might help new users differentiate between staff and regular users. Not that I condone insulting anyone else, but staff have to reprimand people sometimes and catch a lot of insult flak that (at least that's what I hope) regular users don't get.

Again, all of this is open to discussion and I'm not married to any of these changes.

Edit: I had originally displayed the status in our attention yellow. But that did what it's supposed to and kept drawing my eyes to it. So it's white for now, even though that breaks consistency with link popups and search suggestions.
I guess we'll have to experiment a little and figure out a good way to display this. Obviously the main thing about a forum post should be the post and not its metadata.

I think the title should be capitalized, personally

Written by Boxcar Willy on 24.04.2024 at 18:26
I think the title should be capitalized, personally

Yup. Good call.

Written by corrupt on 15.04.2024 at 12:57

Written by Bad English on 15.04.2024 at 11:39
Cool to see when add or edit album we have month written as January, February ,. not 01. , 02. as we had before
Helps a lot do many edits at same time , working on database add albums

You can thank Starvynth for that. He literally phoned this one in last night.

Can you do same in musician section
https://metalstorm.net/bands/bandmember.php?member_id=5282

Still has number, as month.

Written by Bad English on 25.04.2024 at 20:59
Can you do same in musician section

yes

Written by corrupt on 26.04.2024 at 00:08

Written by Bad English on 25.04.2024 at 20:59
Can you do same in musician section

yes

Can you do same in concert, event , festival and tour section ?

After realizing that the style filter on the new/upcoming releases page conflicts with the one on the bands/albums pages, I refactored the former to use the same session variables consistently. So style filters now apply across bands, albums, new-, and upcoming releases.

This also means that new/upcoming releases can now be filtered for multiple styles at once.

I just pushed some updates for the mobile frontpage. Removed margins that were wasting space, improved the layout of article and review cards, and removed the list cutoff resulting from dynamic layout work only needed on desktop.

I rewrote a large chunk of the site's initialization code. Those of you who have experienced slowdowns in page load after we switched to Cloudflare should see huge improvements in page render speed, especially on mobile, and especially on older phones.

I had to re-write a lot of our JS modules and switch from immediate to deferred initialization on a lot of components. There might be side-effects I haven't been able to catch in tests, likely with the search bar, autocompletion widgets, and (most likely) link popups. As usual, if you find anything not working, or not working as expected, please let me know in The "something isn't working (right)" thread.

Cool. Notifications and my page losds a lot faster

Seeing an improvement here, too. Thanks, corrupt!

Yup everything loads much faster for me. Especially list pages are now loading up almost instantly. Good work corrupt.

Thank you so much for this important update, corrupt.

Can finally use the forums on my phone, haven't been able to since the last fix. My phone's not even a year old.

I am one of the people who had slow loading on my phone, and now It's flying. corrupt

Written by nikarg on 14.09.2025 at 10:41

I am one of the people who had slow loading on my phone, and now It's flying. corrupt

Nice smilley

I put some more work in the UI of the go-to-unread-posts feature in the forums. The old, visually untidy, links after thread titles are gone and the functionality has moved into the column displaying the number of posts. That is now a button that takes you to the first unread message if there is one, and the last message in the thread if there is nothing new.

This button is easier to reach on mobile (for right-handed people, I guess), and should make it easier to move to specific posts in a thread. You no longer have to scroll all the way down if you just want to look a the most recent messages of a long thread now. The thread title link still takes you to the beginning of the current page.

Written by corrupt on 31.12.2025 at 15:54

I put some more work in the UI of the go-to-unread-posts feature in the forums. The old, visually untidy, links after thread titles are gone and the functionality has moved into the column displaying the number of posts. That is now a button that takes you to the first unread message if there is one, and the last message in the thread if there is nothing new.

This button is easier to reach on mobile (for right-handed people, I guess), and should make it easier to move to specific posts in a thread. You no longer have to scroll all the way down if you just want to look a the most recent messages of a long thread now. The thread title link still takes you to the beginning of the current page.

Looks great

Bands and albums can now be filtered by having multiple style tags at the same time. The UI should be fairly self-explanatory. I hope...

We pushed the first iteration of a visual rework of band suggestions. It is mobile-friendly and visually consistent with the rest of the site now.

Comments and votes are also no longer the same thing. It is now possible to discuss a suggestion in its comments without voting for it.

We also no longer require a social media link to be a Facebook link. It can now be any link pointing to a band's presence somewhere.

There's more work to do here, but it'll have to happen in multiple steps. This is number one.

Looks cool soecially from mobile, will look ag ig from pc soon.