There have been a few site updates tonight. First of all, new pages were added:

-Music Player: This Flash music player lists all songs included in Omnimaga downloads section, with the exception of MIDI files. It is invisible to guests who don't know the root URL to the player, but registered members can now listen to our music from there without having to download each songs one by one, page by page.

-Miscellaneous: This new page now provide links to both Cemetech's SourceCoder online software (to edit/view BASIC programs without having to install a software), as well as the ASM Unsquisher by Galandros (to open ASM files in hexadecimal form, allowing you to copy ASM programs on your calc without a link cable). This page also links to 4 Omnimaga pages, such as articles and awards, our members list, both of which were originally available through the navigation bar, the forum help and support files built-in SMF software, which we had to hide due to the navigation bar not fitting in 1024x768 resolution, the minimum supported by our site, and the statistic page, still also available from front page and board index, where you can see our most active members by different periods of time, the most popular topics, forums and downloads and obviously, our exploding daily post statistics.

And the navigation bar was updated to be less crowded. For us staff, if we used the minimum site resolution, when we got new private messages, the navigation bar wrapped in two lines. This was finally fixed with the changes. First change is the removal of both ARTICLES and USERS links, as they are now available in the "Miscellaneous" page, and second change is the addition of a MISC button that links to that page.

We debated getting rid of the HOME button to add more stuff in there, and making the banner clickable, but it just didn't look right and was hectic to use, so we ditched this idea.

Enjoy!

On an additional note, as we head towards an all-time Omnimaga monthly activity record with only 352 posts needed in the next 9 days to break it (this month, our daily average is 167), it also seems our traffic is gonna break records, too. After seeing 6 monthly traffic increases in a row from August 2009 (117831 site hits, an average of 3801 per day) to January 2010 (234184, averaging at 7554 a day), a decrease occured in February (202910, 7246/day). However, in March, page views are on the rise again with alerady 219261 on March 23rd, and the average is OVER 9000!!! Bandwidth usage obviously risen, too, from about 35 GB a month to 50 GB in 22 days. Good thing we have 1200 GB per month.

UPDATE (March 24th 2010): 22.5 hours after this news article was posted, the all-time monthly activity record of 4047 posts, set in April 2006, was broken, also breaking a daily activity record in the process with 362 messages in one day. With the exception of Netham-TK493 day (December 31st 2006), the previous highest activity record in day was set on April 30th with 286 posts.

Also, a bug causing an error when trying to remove polls from topic was also fixed on the forums. The song player was also made more visible in the downloads section. The banner was also made clickable.

UPDATE 2: The traffic record on the new board was finally broken, too. Also, we added the IRC logs as well as {AP}'s signature userbar generator in the MISC section.

UPDATE 3 (March 25th 2010): The forum statistic page was updated with a new section below the posting statistics that shows the posting stats in graph form, including those from the old Omnimaga board and the temporary Zetaboard. This graphic will not be updated regulary, though, so for newer stats, you may want to refer to the dynamically updated section right above. Still, it should show a visual representation of Omnimaga activity over the years and even let you compare each years month by month!

Yeah I try to not expand way too fast either, else if we change stuff too often, people get tired of it, since they cannot get used to new stuff. I think the hardest part of all was adding/reorganizing sub-forums, since I didn't want too many parent boards on the index

I still have a lot to learn, though

Simple Machine software is nice to setup at first, but the more in-depth stuff can be rather hectic

I used it on TIMGUL for 2 years alerady, and it took this long until I can manage to edit template files more in depth than just adding buttons/editing css. I am still discovering some built-in SMF admin functions too

I can't imagine how it will be the day I get the old board database back if I decide to convert it to SMF. I may simply leave it as a stand-alone read-only board for the time being.

you should put an advert box somewhere on this site P: i'm sure none of us would mind, and then you wouldn't have to pay as much to keep this running

How about asking the users to contribute if they wanted to Omnimaga by clicking on an ad once a day? That way they would feel involved in helping to maintain Omnimaga without actually paying anything. That would help to reduce the bill for keeping Omnimaga online.

Ah OK. I did think that Google had that kind of rule, but I wasn't sure.

I added a new section to the statistic page. There is now a graphic showing a visual representation of the board stats including the old board, meaning 2005 through 2010. It is not updated regulary, though, so new stats may not always be up to date.