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Hello community,

Today is an exciting day for us. We have finally released our new UGX-Mods Forum as Open Beta to everyone.

Simply head over to https://beta.ugx-mods.com to get started - be sure to give us feedback (see below) so that we can improve it before it goes live on our main domain (production).

Please note: Your user settings won't be carried over, so beta and non beta (production) won't share the same settings.
This also effects some forum settings and statistics like total forum user count and such.

Other than that, Beta and Production share the same data and you are free to use Beta as long the Open Beta goes.

You can also share beta links, once we move out we simply redirect the links to the correct site

Before we dive into the major changes, let's talk about you and your privacy first!

GDPR | Your privacy

You probably received dozens of emails about Privacy Policy changes and such. Well we updated our as well!
We refined it and made it more transparent. We also respect the EU GDPR and apply the changes and features to everyone including non EU citizens.
We face one big issue: Currently only https://beta.ugx-mods.com has these changes!
We try to get out of the Open Beta as fast as possible but we believe it will take up to two weeks before we can do that.
If you have any GDPR related concerns, simply use https://beta.ugx-mods.com which has all changes to comply with GDPR already.
We most likey will refine our Privacy Policy further and require your consent soon again - we are no expe...

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NOTE: the new html emails might also be sent out (rarely) to non-beta users!NOTE2: we changed the sender email from [email protected] to [email protected]ods.com for the new emails.We will deprecate noreply soon or later, so be sure to update your email rules & filters and include [email protected] to your contacts list, to ensure you get them without any issues!

HTML Emails?!

After weeks of work, a new update on https://beta.ugx-mods.com/forum is out for all donators.We are getting closer to the Open Beta!
The biggest update are our emails which we sent out daily to you.We now have shiny new HTML based emails. Not all emails will be sent out yet due to production vs beta state - but you'll progressivly notice the new emails and once we go Open Beta and beyoned, you'll get used to them

This is a major change - feedback as usual much apprecaited. If you notice something is totally odd, let us know!

A complete list of changes is here: https://confluence.ugx-mods.com/display/UGXMODS/UGXSMF+v0.6.0-donor-beta


Thanks and enjoy your weekend

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We had an issue with mail sending for around 18 hours, all registration emails should have been resent.
If not, simply contact us or request the registration email here: https://www.ugx-mods.com/forum/index.php?action=activate
 

New Server - Okay?! - So what exactly does that mean now?

We have now twice as much bandwidth which means a total of 500 Mbps.
Our server is also faster (better CPU) but thats not relevant to you.

In the end, the new server means faster downloads & better page loading times.


We also divided our sever into production and development.

Before our new server, our development tools (Jira, Confluence, ...) and our production websites (UGX-Mods Forum, ...) where hosted on the same server.
Now the forum and upcoming services will run on their own server, this ensures less performance impact when we do some busy dev stuff

We can ensure more redundant backups. We have in total three server now, so each (critical) backup is synced to two servers now.

The new server offered us a new fresh start.

I'm a hobbyist server administrator.
That means I didn't received any porfessional schooling or anything like that.
It's all based on carefull internet resarch, learning by doing and my technical interest in these things.

For UGX I do this now for over 5 years and a fresh start offered me to revisit best practice.
That helped us to migrate easily to a new database engine, a newer PHP version and also improved web server configuration.

The result is a faster and more secure system than before.

Speaking

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