As an admin/dev team member, I would like to work harder on keeping the members of Holy Worlds informed of the latest changes both myself and others have made to the website. Those with a keen eye might have already noticed a few renovations made to the site (or you found this topic because of the fancy link I added on the homepage.) Either way, this topic will be used to keep you informed.

Updates made as of May 8th, 2018:

phpBB has been upgraded to version 3.0.14 - We are still a ways away from the latest release of 3.2, however, this is one of the best things to happen to Holy Worlds for quite some time now. With it, we've received many official bug fixes and we've started from a fresh code base.
HTTPS is now the standard for the entire site - Remember when we first introduced HTTPS and there was the redirect and mixed content issue? Well, that's no longer an issue as everything is now strictly using SSL and you will no longer have to worry about a man-in-the-middle attack stealing your post data! Wouldn't want them to see that secret novel you've been working on, now would we? This is also in anticipation for Google Chrome planning to alert users of unsecured websites later this year.
For those who loved the old site themes, rejoice! We have ported the themes from the Citadel, Historical, and Sci-fi forums - You can now change your theme under the "UCP -> Board Preferences -> Edit global settings -> My board style" setting. We are making preparations for even more theme changes in the near future, possibly including a new mobile responsive theme. Please note; high priority support will only be provided to the DarkFantasy theme. The old themes might introduce "some" unforeseen bugs if you use them but we do plan to address them in the near future.
Fantasy subdirectory has been removed - The entire site now uses the root directory, which also means most other site content besides the chat has been "temporarily" removed". So don't forget to update your bookmarks.
There is an all-new "Report a Bug" feature in the upper navbar - If you ever experience an issue with the Holy Worlds site, please fill out a bug report using that link. Your reports are uploaded directly to our GitHub Issue Tracker at https://github.com/PenoaksDev/HolyWorlds-Issues/issues. You can also browse the issue tracker to find the progress of already reported bugs.
Page redirects, which includes but is not limited to; posting, logins, edit, and just general edits, are now showing up - I can't remember ever seeing these redirect notices.
The built-in phpBB themes prosilver and subsilver2 have also been made available in your theme selection - these will help in the event that you experience issues with the custom theme or just simply don't like any theming at all.
American English has been added as a language option.
For the mods; we have reduced the number of spambot registrations by:
a) Blocking IPs known for spam and DDOS attacks,
b) Changing the captcha to Google reCAPTCHA v2.

Of course, upgrades don't come without consequences; known bugs:

Gallery avatars are broken - As I previous stated, the gallery is temporarily removed and that would be the reason why. We hope to bring it back one day for historical purposes, however, for now, please change your avatar.

If you experience any issues please try using the "Report a Bug" feature we've added first, then try using our "Bug Documentation" thread, and lastly, if you're on Facebook, make a detailed post on the Holy Worlds page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/161325033890573/.

And thank you for following the development of Holy Worlds!

Just a general update post but the initial use of the Bug Report feature has been going splendidly. I apologize for not being able to get to all the issues up front but I'll keep at it in the order of priority. So here is a brief summary as of 6/22/2018.

Fixed:
1. Fixed an issue with chat loading that was caused by a file that was (intentionally) removed during the upgrade.
2. Fixed an issue with forum e-mails not being delivered due to missing modded code that added compatibility with the Mailgun API.
3. Fixed a chat avatar issue that was caused by hacky code that worked around even more hacky code. The upgrade removed all that hacky code and a bug was caused.

On Hold:
1. An issue with the login prompt never being triggered when a topic is visited from a notification e-mail. Waiting to see if this bug still exists since it would seem e-mails weren't being delivered and it might have been caused by e-mails sent from the forum before the upgrade.
2. An issue with the registration form giving errors but creating the user regardless. This then becomes confusing because the user is then presented with a message that their username is already taken or the e-mail is already in use once they correct the issue. This problem existed before the upgrade, so it could be an issue with the forum template. More testing is required.

Followup; templates have been updated to reflect the fixed navigation bar, plus a few other small tweaks, such as our latest copyright appearing in the footer.

Planned Updates:
Improve User Registration Experience.
Add Compliance with the EU Cookie Law and EU GDPR - no matter how much I disagree with them.

Update for September 5th, 2018.

We've incorporated a new anti-spam countermeasure and so far the results have been perfect, not a single spammer has gotten through since last week and the logs don't lie. I'm not going to disclose very many details just in case a spammer is reading this looking for loophole but we're using https://stopforumspam.com/ as a third-party checker on all registrations and posts made by newly registered users.

Keeping everyone posted on the latest changes. I've moved HolyWorlds from my old server that was experiencing some hardware issues to DigitalOcean, a premium virtual hosting service. I hope this fixes some of the lag I've seen over the last couple of years. The only things that got messed up during the migration were some of the BBCode which was due to upgrading to PHP 7 - phpBB 3.1.2 is not officially supported on PHP 7.

I've downgraded the PHP version (7.2 => 5.6) since patching phpBB 3.0.14 to work with PHP 7.2 proved to be much too difficult. Something will eventually have to be done and I hope to have the answer sometime in 2020.

Happy New Year!!!