I've been working on fixing bugs and improving the experience for everyone in the community today. Here's a quick run-down of the changes:

Bans
There has been concern amongst admins that members causing trouble don't care about bans because they did not apply to very many areas of the community. Thus, someone would troll the chatrooms, get banned, then jump into the groups (or other areas) and brag about being banned. This is changing.

As of today, bans apply to chatrooms, tWiiter, bulletin boards, group shoutboxes, and blog comments. Profile comments and other areas will be added to the list soon.

Another possibility is that a ban could completely shut down an account for 24 hours, but admins would have to be more lenient on those who are not repeat offenders, since we are only human and slip up occasionally.

Blogs
I'm overhauling the way blog pages load.

For one, pages loaded slowly, and I am trying to speed that up. The original code has been augmented so many times beyond the original intent that got sloppy. I'm working on cleaning up the structure and removing duplications.

Replying to comments was always a hack, and it is finally being built out in a proper manner. A reply will actually quote the original message, instead of copy-and-paste through Java Script. The old method was buggy. The new one is closer to what you see in the comments sections of many larger websites, including multi-level replies. As a bonus, you are now alerted when someone replies to your comments!

The Mystical Journey
A couple weeks ago, I bought some software called Genetica that is used for making seemless tiles of any size through procedural generation.

I've started making some tiles for levels in the game with the software and am providing them to level designers. I will also start designing some levels myself this weekend, most notably Bryn, the first village of the game.