Hot damn I haven't used this in ages but thought I would again as there have been some new additions on here.
Ok so late 2023 has been quite big for the Mariana Bay, we quite quickly shot up from 70 members around October to over 127 members as of writing this which is awesome and huge, and we are seeing daily activity on here which is awesome as while it did happen, it wasn't a thing that always happened pre October. Thankfully I found the right places to advertise this place in October and frankly revived this place big time in activity, so this resurgence, and to be honest it's not even resurgence as the Mariana Bay is busier than it's ever been, has been awesome.
EDIT: Here's a graph from the Admin Panel so you can get an idea on the massive boost in activity. First few months were very quiet as I was still developing and building up the forum, big boost in the Summer as promotion starts, and then it goes down quite a bit in September until a massive boom in October and especially November.
Right so from around October time what is new on here? Well first off, general formatting improvements and whatever else, if you click your profile button for an example to your top right you'll notice it's more organized and looks less shit, moreover you'll see your unique Marianan ID, this shows when you joined and is something cool to show off so people know how much of a vet or noob you are on here, yes this feature was very much inspired by the Blockland Forum, something many of us have had roots in. This unique ID I want to make visible on your thread posts and profile view too but quite frankly I can't figure out how to make it work rn and with university work due soon there's only so much I can do so bare with me. Also having mentioned thread posts, I want to clean up that formatting too as I'm unhappy with it and give it the ability to show many threads you have to your name also.
What else is new? Well, referring to this thread as the last few months most updates have been user feedback (
https://forum.marianabay.com/threads/user-feedback-suggestions-thread.20/) The default font is 15px now which is much bigger and expressive, badges are now fixed and are now all the same size (thanks to
@Bibr) and hyperlinks now have a redirect warning so users can't be instantly sent to gay porn or a virus by silly or malicious parties. The only things I haven't done from that thread is the latest posts toggle asked by
@Number 9 Coal and the stealth layout option asked for by
@Malice, these things need a looking into.
As for other new features, the album of the day feature now works as intended and runs off a playlist of YouTube videos instead of picking a song for a certain day, we also have a prefix board filter now so if you're only looking for a certain kind of thread you can now filter them which should make finding the content you want to look at way easier. Moreover, fixed the annoying chatroom scroll feature today lol.
Might have missed some things else here in this post but if they were major additions I probably made threads for them anyways.
All in all, hope this recap of site updates has been informative, and as always, thanks for supporting the Mariana Bay.
