Posts from Changes to HeroesWorld. Auto-translated

It was impossible to start a new line after a colon, / opened search instead of entering a character, and Enter stopped working after pasting a link. There were two causes — both have been fixed.

A dash at the start of a line turned the reply into a bulleted list — but that's exactly how dialogue is written in Russian. Auto-formatting at the start of a line can now be disabled with a button in the toolbar.

Nothing could be written before a quote: the cursor physically could not be placed above it. Now there is a "+" strip above the first block, and the up arrow works — this also fixes messages starting with a table, code, or image.

Images pasted from the clipboard (Ctrl+V, screenshots) silently disappeared when saving — the message went out with empty frames. Now such an image is uploaded as a regular attachment.

The same image pasted multiple times created a new attachment each time and was deducted from your quota. Re-pasting now reuses the already uploaded file.

A spoiler, image, or table could not be edited after insertion — the toolbar "froze".

The toolbar now sticks below the header, not behind it: previously it "stuck" exactly where it couldn't be seen.

Fullscreen mode on a phone was a one-way door — with a half-written message on the other side. Editor popup panels (link, image, color, table) that opened beneath it also stopped disappearing.

Enter can be switched to a line break, like in the old editor — the ¶ / ↵ button in the toolbar, and the choice is remembered.

Tables: borders are back, a column-width handle and vertical alignment have been added; tables no longer stretch horizontally on a phone.

A quote was inserted empty — the only field was labeled "Author or source". Now the quote text is asked first. A separate fullscreen editor page for long messages has also been added; a server refusal to save no longer erases what you've typed.

Smileys from the old forum are back in the selection panel — all 64. They worked before, but could only be inserted by remembering the code :smileNN:.

The panel opens on smileys, not on a wall of symbols. Previously it opened on keyboard icons and hieroglyphs — it seemed like there were no smileys, even though all 1,906 icons were in place.

Four smileys appeared as white squares on the dark theme — the background has been cut out. Tab labels have been fixed and translated into all 16 languages.

The quick reply form is open immediately, with the cursor in the input field. Previously it had to be opened first.

Opening a spoiler caused scrolling. That was the browser's behavior: on a spoiler 9,500 px tall, it scrolled the page exactly 9,500 px down. Now the page stays where you left it.

Message preview added before sending — both in threads and private messages.

Quoting your own message is possible again, and the quote appears as a reply under the message that was quoted.

Consecutive messages from the same author can be merged — like on the old forum. Via a button, not automatically: this site stores each message in two languages.

Message time is set at the moment of sending, not when the editor was opened.

Thread titles are editable per language. Previously the English version showed the Russian title, and a manually entered English title was silently deleted on the next save.

Renaming a thread now reaches all language versions and the library, not just one line. An open thread shows a banner about new messages.

Message times were not shown in your time zone. A message written an hour ago appeared as if it were ten hours old. Now the time is shown in your zone — with an exact date and time.

The same in private messages: the send time did not adjust to the time zone and did not even match Greenwich time.

In the "last message" column, next to "3 weeks ago", an exact date is now shown. With just "some amount of time ago" you could neither compare two rows nor tell whether you had already read that thread.

The link to the last page is back in the thread list. 39% of threads are multi-page, and /topic/214/ is 324 pages — you could only get to the first one.

Quick page jumps: −1000 −500 −100 −50 / +50 +100 +500 +1000 and a "go to page N" field. In a thread of 4,841 pages, reaching page 2,500 took about 250 clicks.

A ±10 step has been added: from the middle of a thread, one click could take you at most five pages forward.

Unread threads are highlighted by the title itself — bolder and darker. The link leads to the first unread message, not the last one.

Unread status is now tracked for guests too, per thread. And logging into an account mid-reading no longer wipes the entire accumulated list at once.

The "Mark all as read" button is back on the forum home page. Without it, the only way to reset marks was to open every thread.

A "Top" button has appeared — in the bottom-right corner, after one and a half screens of scrolling.

Jumping to a message no longer "glides" with smooth scrolling through the whole thread — the page opens directly at the desired message.

The message number in the corner is clickable again and opens a single message on a separate page — like showpost.php on the old forum. Old links showpost.php?p=… lead to the same place.

Alt+← / Alt+→ work instantly again. Pages are back in the browser cache: returning to a thread no longer reloads it entirely.

Scrolling no longer jumps: space is reserved for an image before it loads.

⚠️ Your laptop was heating up, the fan was noisy, scrolling was janky — for some of you the real cause was only in Firefox. An effect enabled by a "Firefox-only" rule was applied to the entire page, so no measurement in Chrome could see it. Measured in Firefox 154: CPU load 56% → 24%, scroll stutter — 16 long frames per pass → zero. Meanwhile, the effect drew nothing: pixel-by-pixel comparison of screenshots found no difference at all.

A memory leak in Firefox was fixed separately: every navigation to another page left a "ghost" of the closed one behind.

The background animated canvas was removed earlier — it kept drawing even for those who had turned it off — and the blur effect was lifted from 57 elements of the home page.

The thread page has become noticeably lighter. Data for all site tutorial tooltips was served on every page — 221 KB, 38% of its weight, including for guests (now 18.7 KB; the whole page went from 567 KB → 365 KB). And 1.1 MB of editor code was loaded by all readers, including those who cannot reply.

The home page took 1.2–4.5 seconds to open — white screen, then everything at once. The culprit was the game filter: a technically correct condition made the database launch its own query compiler on every request.

A "No background" toggle has been added — a flat background without changing the whole theme.

A wide-layout toggle has been added: up to 1560 / 1720 px in all threads instead of 1320.

Interface scale is now your setting: 100–125%. Previously Classic silently made the entire interface 15.6% larger than the others.

The account menu no longer goes off the bottom edge of the screen. At 1920×1080 with 125% OS scale, the "Log out" item was simply unreachable.

Samsung Internet in power-saving mode: tapping a thread made the word flash white — that was our own hover effects firing. They have been removed from all lists.

Cards in "Games and categories" no longer twitch under the cursor, an expanded game can be collapsed again, and a collapsed section does not reopen after F5.

The statistics panel has been removed from every thread and profile — it is now only on the main pages.

The author block has been rebuilt to match the old forum + improvement suggestions — 155 px avatar, counters and "battle spirit" in place, date and message number where they used to be.

The "Edit" and "Delete" buttons for your own message are visible again. In Classic, the menu trigger is the author's name, so there was nowhere to find them.

The message menu is back in place, with "Report" moved out as a separate red item at the bottom.

In dark Classic, notifications were completely invisible — black text on a black card, contrast 1.09 to 1 versus the required 4.5. Exactly one combination out of six.

Signatures under messages and rating comments have been restored. The data had been in place since the migration — 4,636 signatures and 75,686 comments — only the display was missing.

"Online / offline" indicators are back next to the author's name — the same monitors from the old forum.

Density, column width, and scale have been brought in line with the old forum; on mobile, content no longer overlaps the banner.

⚠️ Saving your profile silently erased your signature formatting. Of 4,636 signatures, 596 use the old <font> tag, and markup cleaning discarded it on every save of the "About me" form: the words remained, but the color, size, and font disappeared. All you had to do was change your city to recolor your signature under all your messages at once.

The message counter is no longer frozen. It showed a number recorded once at migration: the most active member had 41,518 versus the real 64,544.

"Last activity" is again a concrete date and time, not "was online some amount of time ago". And while a member is online, you can see which thread they are in — for example, whether a moderator is replying in a game thread.

"Last visit" actually updates now — previously the value was recorded once at migration.

The signature is now edited like a regular message — with bold, color, and size, instead of writing HTML by hand. And it's now visible where to change it.

The "Threads" tab in the profile no longer returns 404 on wiki articles: for accounts holding the migrated wiki, 83 of 103 links were broken.

Member search now also searches by display name, not just by login.

The presence icon is now readable and stated once, rather than twice with different words.

At migration, the login was assembled only from characters that logins allow — so those with Cyrillic names, spaces, or symbols got a service user13267. Login recovery by display name and email has been added.

⚠️ Similar letters no longer hand out someone else's account. Latin a and Cyrillic а are visually indistinguishable: a member entered their name and got someone else's login. Now lookalike names are recognized, and the differing letters are highlighted.

Login returns you to where you started. The form always knew how to return, but the "Log in" link in the header did not pass along where you came from.

Logging out no longer throws you to the home page — you stay on the same page, just as a guest.

Changing the interface language did nothing for logged-out users. The button worked, the language was saved — but the page returned in the previous language from the shared cache. It worked on the home page, but not in the forum section or the wiki.

The message language is detected automatically, and you're only asked in ambiguous cases. Thresholds were calibrated on 188,529 real forum messages: Russian text with English creature and town names — the most common form of speech here — is no longer considered "mixed".

You can disable this question entirely — the "don't ask again" checkbox in the dialog itself. The dialog also finally names languages in words rather than codes en and ru.

Short Russian replies were recorded as English. The cause was a "too few letters to judge" threshold that was the same for both alphabets.

An "original priority" toggle has been added: the site shows the author's text or a human translation, and machine translation only if nothing else is available.

⚠️ "Your thread was moved" went out to everyone. A moderator moved 6 threads — the site sent 72 notifications: to everyone who had ever replied, and one for each thread in the batch. Six were due — to the authors.

Links in notifications led to 404. The message itself was intact — it was the link that broke: three different places assembled it in their own ways, two incorrectly.

A preview has appeared in the private message form.

Buttons in the message form wrap on narrow screens — nothing overflows at 320 px.

⚠️ Attachments were shown in random order. No sorting was specified in the query. The old forum sorted by attachment number, and the migration preserved those numbers — now the order is exactly the same as it was on heroesworld.ru.

.webp is now accepted — the only format the site itself produced but would not accept back: every uploaded image is re-saved as webp (46,366 attachments versus 10,950 in all other formats combined), and trying to attach one again answered "File extension not supported".

.rar and the full set of Heroes map and campaign formats are now accepted — h3c, h4c, h4m, h4r. Previously you could attach an H3 map, but not a campaign alongside it.

Avatars have been restored to their original proportions. At migration, each one was cropped into a centered square: 2,677 of 4,610 were non-square, and 1,248 lost a quarter or more — heads and legs were cut off.

Images in messages are displayed in their own proportions, not forcibly 16:9: a portrait next to text turned into a ~27 px icon. The height set by the author is respected again.

Table column width now matters more than image width: a 1152 px image in a 123 px column no longer overflows it.

Captions on attachment tiles blended into the background — the file name, size, and download count were unreadable. Files also come before images now, and a map no longer gets stuck in the middle of the grid.

An image attachment opened in a separate tab downloaded instead of displaying.

Inline image attachments have been restored — they were broken by a space in the service timestamp in old links.

Old table borders are back (border="1"), and the internal scroll that clipped tall tables in old messages has been removed.

"Insert image" → "Attachments" tab was inactive right after upload: the server re-saves images to WebP and renames them, while the editor looked for the old name.

Quick search managed to say "nothing found" before it even started searching — that is, it answered before the question was asked. Now a waiting indicator is shown during that time.

Files from the "Other" category did not show up in quick search — even with an exact file name match, although they were found on the full search page.

Quick search has become noticeably more responsive: five rows are visible in the group, while 500 were fetched from the server — now it's 50.

The activity block on /forum: showed 9 threads instead of 10, rows and cards shifted by 2 px on hover, and game names under threads were plain text instead of links — all three fixed.

A section again shows 60 threads per page, not 15. That's what the old forum served; at fifteen, the "Tavern" went from 14 pages to 55.

forum.heroesworld.ru opens the forum again. A bookmark to the subdomain root led to the site's home page — making it seem the forum had been removed. Deep old links work as they did.

Switching the game in the top panel returns to the top of the page. Previously, if you changed the game at the bottom of the list, the section opened above the visible area — you had to scroll up, and inside a thread only the background image changed.

"Tavern" and "Town Hall" have been moved above the activity block — they couldn't be found: they started about 2.6 screens down, on a page that looked finished above. "Town Hall" has been added to the section list and appears once, not as two lines.

"Latest images" open the page the image came from, not a bare file in a new tab. And screenshots from the "Town Hall" no longer appear there: those are bug reports, not game images.

Maps: type, size, and author are now visible on the thread page itself and can be corrected. Previously the record was "one-shot": a typo in the author's name stayed forever.

A thread author can remove their thread from the library. A Heroes 5 file replacement manual hung on the maps page next to real releases — simply because a demo .h5m was attached to it.

A thread in the activity block now has a section badge, not just a game one: the old one led to the entire game board — dozens of sections. And on the "show all" page there were no badges at all.

The object card grid can now be inserted in the editor — previously it could only appear from HTML.

Preview in the wiki editor. The editor shows the typed text, but not what the server will render: a knowledge base object card appears as a short chip, a stat link as a caption, and a broken link is only discovered after saving.

Bulk message moving: multiple messages are selected with checkboxes and moved at once. Previously, eleven off-topic replies meant eleven consecutive dialogs.

Selected messages can be moved into a new thread. The workaround — creating a dummy, moving, renaming — left someone else's first message at the top and attributed the thread to the moderator.

And bulk deletion — with the same selection, reversible.

Message menus are now separated by meaning: the menu by the name is about the member, the "⋮" menu is about the message itself. Subscribing to the author has been added directly to the member menu.

⚠️ Emoji in titles and messages turned into "?". The loss happened before the data even reached us: the old server was exported in an encoding where a character gets at most three bytes, while an emoji takes four. Cyrillic takes two and survived, so the damage looked selective. The characters are being restored from a live copy of the old database — character by character, with a check that the string hasn't been edited since.

⚠️ Links to profiles inside old messages returned 404 — 1,156 messages. In the old editor, addresses were written without a leading slash; that worked on the old forum, but here the browser builds them from the current page's address.

110 threads displayed with no title at all: at migration, the prefix in square brackets was cut off, and if the title consisted of just that prefix — nothing remained.

Title translations were marked as "author's" even though they were machine-made. All 10,451 titles were marked as human-written at migration, which made the "original priority" toggle do nothing and prevented titles from being regenerated when the original was edited. 26 genuine human translations were preserved.

Videos destroyed by markup cleaning are being restored from what remains in the message text.

In the reply form, the author's own badge showed "battle spirit 0", without the registration date or message count.