Changelog: HPC:Factor Site, Engines & Modules

Changes for December 2018

2018-12-05
- UI: Changed the default font

2018-12-08
- SCL: Added Total Downloads and Popularity output fields to the details page
- SCL: Changed the URL rewrite definition to place the ID as the first parameter due to a collision with the "/" in "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP3 for Windows CE 2.00/2.01" causing it to be unloadable
- Core: Upgraded Elara Cache 1.0.13 (2015) > 1.1.2 (2018)

2018-12-09
- Core: Upgraded Elara Cache 1.1.2 > 1.1.3
- Core: Added Cache REST API

2018-12-10
- Core: Added Forum REST API

2018-12-11
- Forum: Re-wrote PD9 forum logon page to use the Elara HttpCookie, adding in Secure mode and SameSite modes to the sites cookie security
- Forum: Cleaned up PD9's non-expiring cookie mess
- Core: All core cookies now issue with Secure mode and SameSite parameters set

2018-12-17
- Forum: Cleaned up some of the fixed pixel with font declarations in the PD9 CSS
- Forum: Eradicated all references to spacer.gif in the PD9 source for the UI

2018-12-18
- Forum: Added a user self-service screen to the control panel allowing them to close and delete their own account
- Forum: Implemented a badges system visible on the Profile Page

Changes for January 2019

2019-01-14
- Core: Migrated Elara from Jet to MS SQL Server
- Core: Upgraded Elara MsSqlDbConn 1.5.4 -> 1.5.8
- Forum: Added LinkedIn field to user profile
- Forum: Added Facebook field to user profile
- Forum: Added Twitter field to user profile
- Forum: Added Skype field to user profile
- Forum: Removed MSN field from user profile
- Forum: Removed AIM field from user profile
- Forum: Updated the layout on the profile editor
- Forum: Removed existing icons from the profile input/output pages
- Forum: Normalised the date input field layout with its description on the profile editor
- H/PC:Update: Fixed incompatible SQL
- DLC: Fixed incompatible SQL
- QLink: Fixed incompatible SQL
- News: Fixed incompatible SQL
- D&S: Fixed incompatible SQL
- D&S: Fixed matrix view which seems to have just not been displaying any results since ???
- SCL: Fixed incompatible SQL
- Directory: Fixed incompatible SQL

2019-01-15
- Directory: Added https link support

2019-01-16
- Forum: Added Columnist badge
- Forum: Added Autobiographer badge
- Forum: Altered forum message side bar layouts. Removed rank decorations and member number. Added membership level colour coding to +Subscriber users.
- Core: Completed migration of Elara schema and data to MS SQL server
- HCL: Data logic changes in lookup tables

2019-01-17
- Forum: Restored personal photo to the user profile page
- Forum: Increased the file upload limits for +Subscribers
- Forum: Improved personal photo and avatar upload UI's
- Forum: Disabled avatar and personal photo via hot-linking
- Forum: Added 'Your PM limit' to the bottom of the PM window
- Forum: Implemented variable PM limit based upon +Subscriber status

2019-01-22
- News: Modernised the layout of news comments slightly
- News: Minor code optimisations
- News: Fixed non-working comment deletion button for news moderators

2019-01-29
- Forum: Improved layout on the search page, added HTML labels to form elements
- Forum: Made Forum buttons larger

Changes for February 2019

2019-02-08
- Core: Removed ~1100 lines from the Pegasus Kernel
- Forum: Added REST API for latest posts
- Forum: All entry points for latest posts / latest support posts converted to AJAX/JSON
- Forum: Removed PD9 Meta-Refresh from category-view.asp in favour of the AJAX provider

2019-02-09
- HCL: Fixed pre-select on OS selection
- HCL: Minor UI changes
- Core: Removed 100 lines from the Pegasus Kernel

Changes for March 2019

2019-03-25
- Forum: Added eBay link toolbar button
- Forum: Added eBay link BBS API code
- D&S: Added eBay buyers link to the specs and compare pages and duplicated it at the top and bottom of each page
- D&S: Added the OEM name to the page title
- HCL: Added eBay buyers link to the device details page
- HCL: Added the OEM name to the page title

Changes for April 2019

2019-04-11
- Forum: Updated Marbl to version 0.9.8
- Forum: Wired in Marbl for eBay to the BBS code and post editor
- HCL: Converted eBay code to use Marbl
- HCL: Updated Marbl to version 0.9.8
- D&S: Converted eBay code to use Marbl
- D&S: Updated Marbl to version 0.9.8

2019-04-15
- Forum: Implemented ReCAPTCHA on log-in and registration pages
- Forum: Added 'View Recent Posts by...' link to the forum user profile

2019-04-24
- DLC: Fixed bug in the syntax of the W3C date/time format in the sitemap which was causing errors
- DLC: Added canonical URL headers
- Directory: Added rel="nofollow" to all egress links

2019-04-29
- Core: Upgraded Elara CdoMapi 1.3.0 -> 1.3.4
- Core: Upgraded Elara MailServerconfig 1.0.0 -> 1.0.2
- Forum: Merged the code for the original 2007 account validation system with the 2013 pre-validation system
- News: Changed the response content type of the main news RSS feed to text/xml to prevent it trying to download as an attachment in Firefox
- News: Main news RSS feed now uses Elara Cache instead of ASP Application object
- Forum: The text labels for the tick box options at the bottom of the post editor will now click to select the tick box
- SCL: Hardened the canonical URL's, reduced the legal character set and moved them into the database so that they do not have to be generated on the fly every page load
- SCL: All visible internal hyperlinks now use the canonical friendly URL's instead of the numeric lookup ID's

2019-04-30
- SCL: Added an XML sitemap

Changes for May 2019

2019-05-01
- HCL: Added an XML sitemap
- Forum: Added administrative shortcut from user profiles to the user manager

2019-05-02
- Badges: Added the badge description next to the badges index on the Badges home page https://www.hpcfactor.com/community/badges/

2019-05-04
- DLC: Added SEO friendly URL support
- DLC: Updated sitemap URLs
- DLC: Updated canonical URLs
- DLC: Cleaned up version numbering from many download titles

2019-05-05
- SCL: Fixed rating submission form
- SCL: Fixed compatibility submission form

2019-05-06
- D&S: Added Site Map
- DLC: Deleted legacy site map
- DLC: Added new Site Map
- News: Added Site Map

2019-05-09
- DLC: Fixed a crash issue with a request for an out of bounds page in the search results
- Core: Elara MsSqlDbConn 1.5.8 -> 1.5.9
- SCL: Fixed absence of line breaks in description text body field printouts

2019-05-10
- SCL: Altered compatibility layout to include the application name

2019-05-16
- Census: Fixed crash bug report ( https://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=18594&po... )
- Census: Ported to O-O base class provider
- Census: Re-write the form logic on the forum profile
- Census: Deprecated and removed Census.api

2019-05-17
- HCL: HCL v4.5 - now with device/CE version compatibility data views
- HCL: Re-designed compatibility details (HCD) page
- HCL: Added links to D&S for compatible/incompatible devices
- HCL: Added links to the submitter/inserters forum profile
- HCL: Fixed missing Form Factor field
- HCL: Added missing Amazon Germany (DE) referral link in the Marbl plug-in
- HCL: Some tidying of the legacy hcl.api
- Core: Updated Elara CSS Charting

2019-05-18
- SCL: The comments system was not working

2019-05-20
- Forum: Added password complexity requirement for new registrations

2019-05-21
- H/PC:U: More information pop-up windows were displaying the brief summary in the title field
- H/PC:U: Improved UI

2019-05-22
- Forum: Added a spoiler tag to the BBS markup

2019-05-27
- Reviews: Added new side navigation widget to contain the ratings, buyers resources and forum link data
- Reviews: Added new widget to the hardware reviews back-catalogue
- Forum: Fixed the search page's default response to pressing the enter key from being to display the calendar control to executing a search
- Forum: Implemented a subscribers group

2019-05-28
- Forum: Fixed an issue on the online users list where staff who were also in the subscribers group were appearing twice

2019-05-29
- Badges: The badges list in the community section now states when the server last re-generated the badge awards
- HCL: Fixed errors in the Submit to the HCL form
- Forum: Fixed an issue where-by member->group assignments were not correctly applying forum access permissions

2019-05-31
- Forum: Added additional ref='nofollow' markup to try and discourage bots from non-content forum pages (e.g.the post creator)

Changes for June 2019

2019-06-05
- News: Corrected bot link issue in the archive section which was allowing bots to follow links through to future dates. Crawlers were attempting to index each future month through until the year 9945.
- News: Year is now preselected in the navigation bar for the current view
- News: Month is now preselected in the navigation bar for the current view
- News: Added canonical URL tags to attempt to clean up the search engine mess
- DLC: Removed site map entries for SCL only downloads
- Forum: Added rel="nofollow" to all thread-skip.asp references

2019-06-06
- SCL: Fixed encoding issue in show all apps by developer links
- Reviews: Completed converting Software reviews to use the new side navigation widget
- News: Fixed JSON error reported by Google Search Console

2019-06-07
- Forum: Removed HCL EULA Acceptance code
- Forum: Census results on user profiles will only spread over 4 columns
- HCL: Removed all EULA pre-acceptance code
- HCL: Changed the root page from hpchcl.asp to default.asp
- HCL: Added featured and random devices to the home page
- HCL: Added featured device to the side navigation across the HCL
- HCL: Removed EULA start page
- DLC: Search results pagination was reporting 1 more item in search results than was actually being returned. For results divisible by 10, this was causing a blank page to be available at the end of the results pagination
- DLC: Improved search results layout, fixed overflow issue

2019-06-09
- News: Further improved news comments layout
- News: Added avatar display to news comments

2019-06-11
- Forum: Added generic avatar placeholders for users with no defined avatar
- Forum: Adjusted avatar draw logic

2019-06-13
- UI: Implemented a viewport selected main navigation, providing a compressed menu drop-down selector for small screen devices
- UI: CSS improvements

2019-06-14
- H/PC:Update: [Bug Fix] Some updates were not being presented as being available due to the category failing to draw into the side navigation widget
- Forum: Profile pages for banned users will no longer print to registered users after it was observed that spammers are checking for visibility of profile pages of search engine URL spam accounts before registering new accounts (even though search engines cannot view profile pages)
- Badges: Added default avatar to Badge membership print-out
- Badges: [Bug Fix] "Years service" badges were being incorrectly awarded to people early due to a rounding issue in SQL Server DATEDIFF
- Themes: Added alt tags to image thumbnails
- Forums: Added missing description tags to key pages

2019-06-15
- Forums: Updated layout on the forum header to a responsive layout
- Forums: Updated layout of the quick reply box and added a basic toolbar
- Forums: Improved terrible JavaScript code for the forum toolbar (slightly)
- UI: Converted the main sub-navigation bar to use UL/LI and implemented a fix on the mobile version menu so that the sub-navigation is vertical and not horizontal
- UI: CSS improvements

2019-06-16
- Forums: [Bug Fix] Invalid password errors were not being shown to users during logon and the logon system was acting as though you had successfully logged-in
- News: Print view. Removed redundant code, CSS, markup, modernised HTML markup version. Eliminated 404ing layout content, added View Port


2019-06-19
- Forums: Converted PD9 mail server config to use data from the Elara mail server config class
- UI: Fixed image distortion when re-sizing onto mobile device screen sizes
- H/PC:Update: Replaced "installation type" with "version" on the available updates aggregator dashboard

2019-06-20
- Forums: Additional CSS improvements for mobile devices on forum-view, thread-view and category-view
- Reviews: Modified the Reviews Rating Widget to control author attributes on the page
- Reviews: Improved About the Author navigation widget with non-staff member output and printouts for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Reviews: Normalised all historic hardware and software reviews onto a common template layout using the Reviews Rating Widget
- Reviews: Added review language and author to the Reviews Rating Widget meta data schema

2019-06-21
- Forums: Restored AWOL subscription level badges in poster information boxes


2019-06-24
- Forums: Added SCL featured application and app link to the feature rotator strap at the top of every forum page
- Reviews: Reviews homepage layout made mobile device friendly


2019-06-25
- SCL: Added schema.org Products to all SCL pages
- HCL: Added schema.org Products to all HCL pages
- Reviews: Extended the fields being printed out in the schema.org Review metadata
- HCL: Added featured device and random device to the HCL homepage
- HCL: Added featured device to the navigation side-bar across the HCL
- HCL: Created Featured Device Nagivation widget
- HCL: Normalsied the look of the HCL search navigation widget
- Forums: Added strict & httponly states to the guest cookies
- Core: Fixed missing httponly and strict tags from the session cookie

2019-06-26
- QLink: Fixed XSS vulnerability on the search page

Changes for July 2019

2019-07-02
- Forum: [Bug Fix] Forum download code was refusing to stream files larger than 4MB to clients, causing phantom 404 errors.

2019-07-09
- Forum: Enabled monolithic site-wide use of UTF-8 and OpEx
- Forum: Converted the forum core to use the monolithic Kernel OpEx & CodePage
- DLC: [Bug Fix] DLC link validation wasn't working for DLC content mapped to the search friendly canonical URLs. Fault reported by costinstroie.

2019-07-12
- Badges: Added 'Boy Scout' badge
- Badges: Added 'Grand Phalerist' badge

2019-07-21
- Badges: Added 'Review Author' badge
- Reviews: Converted all images in reviews from a tabular image/caption layout to HTML figure/figcaption
- Reviews: Removed non-working "Latest Review" sub-navigation link

2019-07-22
- HCL: Fixed regression fault on 'By HPC' views caused by the UTF-8 / OpEx change on the 9th
- News: Fixed regression fault on 'Printer Friendly' caused by the UTF-8 / OpEx change on the 9th

2019-07-24
- D&S: Reworded the link through to H/PC:Update
- D&S: Added link through to the HCL
- D&S: Added link through to the SCL

2019-07-28
- HCL: Fixed regression issue from UTF-8 / OpEx change on the 9th in byHpc
- SCL: Fixed regression issue from UTF-8 / OpEx change on the 9th in the getImage provider

2019-07-30
- News: Fixed regression issue from UTF-8 / OpEx change on the 9th on news posts comment submission
- News: Clicking a reply button next to a user sends you to the reply form instead of the top of the page

2019-07-31
- News: [Bug Fix] Route to generate a crash error was present on the news archive page

Changes for August 2019

2019-08-01
- Directory: [Bug Fix] Fixed forced crash issue discovered in logs on the home page
- SCL: [Bug Fix] Fixed forced crash issue discovered in logs on the category view page
- Toolkit: LMHost generator for Windows CE wasn't working. Re-write it to remove the need to write to the server file system. Code optimisation and security updates

2019-08-03
- Forums: Scavenged stale profile photo and avatar records from the database where the resultant file is not in the file system (mainly from the 2006 crash). This will solve a large number of HTTP500 errors from being logged.

Changes for September 2019

2019-09-09
- H/PC:Update: [Bug Fix] Navigating from the update aggregator onto the FAQ or How to install page threw an exception as the secondary page navigation paradigm hadn't been updated

Changes for January 2020

2020-01-11
- H/PC:Update: [Bug Fix] User Adanroj reported that the file size estimates on H/PC:Update detail pages were erroneous.

2020-01-13
- SCL: Re-enabled schema.org meta data to allow user ratings to propagate to a search engine
- SCL: Added JSON output view
- SCL: Minor code optimisations

2020-01-16
- SCL: The comments side navigation widget was using the old URL standard, causing form submission errors
- Forum: Re-ordered the type face definitions for the CODE BBS markup style

Changes for April 2020

2020-04-24
- DLC: Search results containing SCL items were displaying the data field as 1st January 1900

2020-04-28
- DLC: Download details pages now link to the forum profile of the DLC item poster

2020-04-29
- Interface: Updated the copyright dates to 2020
- Interface: Reactivated our participation in the HoneyPot project

Changes for May 2020

2020-05-19
- Badges: Significant re-write of the SQL logic (and complexity) involved in the daily badge regeneration script. The system no longer block deletes all badges of a type, but instead compares a delta of who should and shouldn't have any particular badge, leaving the original in-place. This will allow the 'latest issued' pages to gradually display members correctly.
- Badges: 'Boy Scout' badge now requires 10 or more existing badges, not more than 10
- Badges: The system will send you a PM when you are awarded a new badge (it will not trigger an email notification)

2020-05-20
- Forums: I've written and executed a module for the forums that has cleaned up forum attachments from back in 2006 when we had a server drive fail. Attachments have now been deleted from their corresponding posts if the binary data was not present in the file system. This messes with history a little bit, however I think it is better than people not getting the file, search engines seeing a file that isn't there and the server logs continuing to get rammed with broken file stream requests. I knocked about 1000 attachments out of the database that we have obviously lost. It should hopefully prevent people registering to download non-existing files and reduce the size of the error log.

2020-05-21
- Forums: The 'Your Settings' home page now displays the expiration date of your +Subscriber status, if applicable

2020-05-29
- H/PC:Update: [Bug Fix] Detail page loader wasn't validating the query string variable properly leading to error output being sent to the browser when hackers come calling

2020-05-31
- Forum: Properly de-duplicated ~200 entries out of the banned email domains relation, duplicates of which carried trailing CR's. Fixed the forum code that allowed duplicate entries in the first place.

Changes for June 2020

2020-06-12
- DLC: Search was returning multiple instance of the same HCL driver if the download was present for multiple version of Windows CE due to a field selection error.
- News: Removed mail to friend functions
- Core: Removed some very legacy styling code from the kernel

2020-06-19
- Forum: Moved the website address field down with the social media and messaging fields on the Your Settings, edit profile page
- Forum: Added a notice to the Your Setting edit profile page about search engine visibility of web and social media links to tell spammers that they are wasting their time
- Forum: Added a notice to the create account page about search engine visibility of web and social media links to tell spammers that they are wasting their time

2020-06-27
- Forum: Modified the validation for new users to prevent all or post the @ part of the email address from being used in the the username as we are seeing a regular increase in dead GMail account registrations that are copy/pasting their email address into the username field to create junk accounts