Experts have it easy: An essay Read it here

An interesting blog post that WTL/Mario recently shared.

I found it to be a worthwhile read - it does a good job of articulating why expert guidance is valuable, and also how experts sometimes fall short in providing guidance to beginners.

I might quote this article at some random point in the future.

WeatherStar 4000 Simulator Link

For quite a few years, there's been a freeware simulation of WeatherStar 4000. If you don't know what WS4000 is, it was the software that The Weather Channel used for its Local Forecasts many years ago.

It's fun to set up your own Local Forecast with custom music and silly crawl messages.

A recent update restores radar functionality, which hasn't always worked in recent years.

Be forewarned that it takes a bit of trial and error to set up the locations you want to appear in your forecast.

May 2025 dev update JaxBoards continues to grow more awesome. JaxBoards 2.1.5 offers a lot of architectural improvements and a nicer mobile experience, as well as some fun things!

JaxBoards Architecture:

• Sean rebuilt a lot of code so that it takes better advantage of PHP 8's features - now it's a web app built for PHP 8 instead of a PHP 4 web app that we retrofitted to run in PHP 8.
  

New features:

• Added some classic games and Easter eggs (and added a new one)
  
• Replaced the clock icon with an emoji that shows a different image depending on when the user timed out
  

Bug fixes:

• Solved all the remaining PHP warnings/errors
  
• Googlebot is able to crawl the forums without crashing
  
• Fixed an issue where the forum topic order sometimes got out of whack
  
• Fixed JavaScript tooltip browser warning (no actual effect)
  

Stuff only admins will notice:

• Now you get an "are you sure" prompt when deleting shoutbox posts - previously it was easy to delete those by mistake
  
• Added a PHP error log monitor
  
• Made a spacing fix in modcontrols.php
  

Themes

• Made several skins responsive - a much-desired feature
  
• Created a CSS-based banner for Lithosphere, which should improve load times - thanks Spritey for offering some help with the CSS
  
• Made the body slightly wider for the Bibby Team skin
  
• The New Winter Blue skin's footer is visible now
  
• Removed an extra copy of the Themes folder I accidentally uploaded while setting up the boards in January
  

Data

• Fixed obsolete bibbyteam dot jaxboards dot com links on the forum so they use the current domain instead
  
• Fixed obsolete bibbyteam dot jaxboards dot com links on my old profiles
  
• Changed # to ? in some older links so they'll work properly
  
• Made sure all shoutbox posts are in the database
  

Server infrastructure/change management

• Sean set up Git on the server, making it a lot easy to deploy changes
  

We now have a mobile theme! I'm pleased to announce that the Lithosphere skin has been upgraded to a responsive design! This means the Lithosphere skin will offer a great experience on both desktop/laptop PCs and on mobile devices. This should make for a better user experience, especially since a fairly high percentage of people do most of their browsing on mobile devices nowadays.

Fortunately, these changes won't result in any significant changes to the desktop experience - in fact, you might not even notice these changes if you're on a larger screen.

A very big thanks to Sean for helping make this happen.

The JaxBoards Default, Yoga, and Bibby Team Classic skins are also fully responsive as well. It should be possible to make all the skins responsive, though each skin would take a bit of time to upgrade. If you like using a certain skin on mobile and want to make a request, feel free to do so!

I'll still keep doing my monthly "here's what's new" dev updates, but this is a big enough deal to warrant its own topic.

The Nintendo Switch 2 Nintendo recently formally announced its successor to the Nintendo Switch. Are you thinking of getting one?

I might get one eventually - we shall see. I never had an original Switch, believe it or not, so I like that it's going to be backwards compatible with the vast majority of original Switch games.

April 2025 dev update It might be April Fool's Day, but JaxBoards 2.0.2 is anything but foolish.

Time zone oddities and issues with topic/forum read markers should be fixed now. Fingers crossed.

Sean fixed an annoying bug where users who don't have a birthday filled out aren't able to update some of their profile fields.

The Quick Reply window has a close button again. We're not sure when the "X" button ran away, but either way, it's back now. Thanks again to Sean for looking into this.

One of the nice things about the Googlebot is it basically serves as an automated testing suite. If it can't crawl a page for whatever reason, it'll tell you in Google Search Console. This analysis has helped me fix a few bugs that could break things for human users as well. For example, it helped me find a bug that caused JaxBoards to crash if a guest user tried to access any topic containing a poll. Whoops. Similarly, I found an issue with certain YouTube links (I think those containing start/endtime parameters). The problematic code should be fixed now. Also, I expanded the size of the "location_verbose" field in the sessions table from a maximum of 100 characters to 128. This fixed a rare bug where JaxBoards would crash if anyone tried to view a topic with a topic title of more than 87 characters in length.

Some of these bugs have been issues since the beginning and prevented a nontrivial number of pages from being visible in search engines - if Google runs into too many broken pages, sometimes it'll stop trying to crawl other pages as well.

Bots and crawlers become a LOT more active almost as soon as I made these changes. This is basically a good thing, since a lot of traffic comes from search engines like Google and Bing, and since it's helped us fix bugs in the JaxBoards software. On the other hand, I don't want to roll out the red carpet for every bot, since many bots provide no value to site owners and communities, and some bots (especially bots training LLMs) consume so much bandwidth that they can crash your site. That's not to mention some of the other ethical quandaries with gen AI bots. For now I want to monitor how bots are behaving after I made these changes, though soon I'll probably need to start blocking or throttling the less useful bots.

Also, WTL has been cooking up some great updates that add more professional rigor to the JaxBoards codebase. Not all of these changes in production yet, but I am impressed with what he's doing! If you'd like to follow along with the latest code changes, here's another reminder that our GitHub is a thing.

[5/2 Edit: Changed "Quick Reply button" to "Quick Reply window"]

Bibby named new head coach of Sacramento State men's basketball https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/44390772/sources-ex-nba-star-mike-bibby-agrees-deal-coach-sacramento-state

Mike Bibby, that is.

He was a prominent basketball player in his time, and now he's becoming a college head coach.

I am not Mike Bibby. Probably.

Stupid Political Game 2024 Download it here... if you really want to

Something I made late last year, back while JaxBoards was on hiatus.

High on the list of things "nobody* asked for but they got anyway," this was 2024's pointless game about the United States presidential election! After all, commemorating presidential elections is an ancient tradition that I couldn't pass up. There is a very distinct chance that this game could've been inspired by something else.

And yes, there are online high scores and multiple endings.

Have fun... or something.

* One person on YouTube asked for this. I don't know why either.

March 2025 dev update JaxBoards 2.0.1 is here! It offers a lot of new features and updates. Here's an overview of what's new:

User Experience
Newly-registered users now see a message noting that they might not be able to post until an admin approves their account. This fixes a potential source of confusion and annoyance for new members.

I restored all the old post attachments (all six of them) from my backup, so you should be able to download them from posts. We never used file attachments much, so uploading new attachments is currently disabled. If anyone really wants uploading back, let me know.

Bug Zapping
For a while, JaxBoards had a bug with the forum icons on the index page. The first forum in a category always had an "Unread Topics in This Forum" icon, even if you'd read all the topics in that forum. Sean helped me fix this code, which should be working a lot better now. Peeking under the hood, we're now using JSON instead of BLOBs for storing the forum/topic read flags in sessions, which should be more efficient and a lot easier to debug.

The Quote Post button was showing up even for guests, which obviously doesn't make sense. This problem also caused confusion for searchbots - more on that later. Fortunately, this should be fixed now.

I removed the Full Edit button from the post-editing forms. I don't think most people use this button very often - if I'm mistaken, please let me know. If we bring this back, we'll need to make some code fixes, since there was a nasty bug with the Full Edit button that could blank your post.

I fixed a few more trailing spaces in various places, like post links, search results, and IM windows.

Skins
I squashed a few bugs with skins:

• Images for the Contact Details infobox logos were partially chopped off
  
• The Edit and Quote button icons in topics were also slightly scrunched
  
• The BT Classic logo was misaligned in Firefox
  
• The New Winter Blue snowman was missing
  
• The JaxBoards icon (used for PMs and IMs) was nearly invisible in the Vapor skin

Also, the Hello Kitty (a.k.a. Pink) skin is hidden for now. This skin had a lot of custom code and now-broken images, making it very difficult to maintain in 2025. Plus, no one was using it. If anyone likes it and wants to revitalize it, let me know.

Accessibility
I made a bunch of fixes designed to make JaxBoards more accessible. While Sean's original code did a good job of building an accessible forum, there were still a few things that needed updating.

I used an accessibility tool to scan every page on the forums and every skin to check for potential issues. This helped me spot a couple of places where inputs weren't properly matched up with their respective labels. I also added title and aria-label tags in a bunch of places.

I fixed a few missing alt tags for images.

While these accessibility tests are primarily designed to help people living with disabilities - especially those who use assistive technology like screen readers - they can be helpful to anyone. For example, I think the new tooltips for certain controls will make it clearer what they do, even if you never use assistive technology.

SEO
Google is now crawling the forums, and I've set up Google Webmaster Tools to check how searchbots are performing and to see what searches are bringing visitors to the forums. We've never had a tremendous amount of traffic from Google searches, but this is still a good way to spot potential bugs and issues.

I added a few more user agents for bots that can show up in the Users Online list. This helps me monitor which bots crawl the forums most often - and, more importantly, helps me evaluate whether a bot is crawling pages excessively and needs to be blocked.

I removed the "nofollow" rule from URL tags. Using nofollow is designed to reduce the incentive for spambots, but since I have admin approval of new accounts enabled, I think it's safe to eliminate this.

Other stuff
I ran the W3C Validator to make sure there are no significant issues with our HTML output. The index page should be free of W3S errors and warnings, which is nice. Any remaining issues are probably inconsistencies between the XHTML (which we used to use) doctype and HTML5 (which we're using now). You don't need to care about this... unless you find such things interesting, of course.

I made a few small updates to the BT "mainsite" - I added a favicon and included a link to the forums.

I plan to keep making updates and improvements to the JaxBoards software in the months to come, though future updates are likely to be a lot more incremental. As usual, if anything is broken or you have an idea for a cool new feature, be sure to speak up.

3/19 Edit - Fixed a typo in the W3C Validator name

Scammers are getting smarter A text message I received today:



Obviously, I didn't click on the link, since there are several red flags that this came from a scammer: the link shortener, the unreasonable timeline, and the nonexistent order ID. And, of course, Amazon doesn't normally send us text messages. Still, I could totally see how someone who is nontechnical or has their brain on autopilot could click on this phishing link. Most people have ordered stuff from Amazon before, and the quality of products and sellers can definitely vary.

If you're reading this post, you're probably fairly technically savvy. But be careful... phishing e-mails (and scams in general) are growing more sophisticated.