Posts from Changes to HeroesWorld.

Unfortunately, the website, forum, and chat were unavailable from November 25th to 30th.

As it turned out today, the cause was incorrect software configuration by other server administrators, on the server where HeroesWorld is hosted, which made the *.heroesworld.ru domains inaccessible outside of the server.

The problem was discovered and the settings were restored on the evening of November 30th. Website, forum, and chat monitoring has also been added, so a similar problem is unlikely to occur in the future, unless HeroesWorld and its monitoring system fail simultaneously.

1. All HeroesWorld domains have been fully switched to SSL encryption, and now they are only accessible via the HTTPS scheme.



https://heroesworld.ru
https://forum.heroesworld.ru
https://heroesworld.net

www subdomains are now automatically redirected to the equivalent without www (www is a rather outdated practice and doesn't offer anything other than a longer address):

https://www.heroesworld.ru -> https://heroesworld.ru

All links with HTTP are now redirected by the server to the HTTPS equivalent.

It should be noted that if some forum pages contain links to images via HTTP in the messages, most browsers will consider such a page unsafe and will display a warning in the form of an icon in the address bar, indicating that the page contains content loaded via HTTP.

If, as a result of the above changes, something does not work as it should, please write to me, and we will fix it.

2. New tags have been added, available in the message editor:

[spoiler=title]spoiler content[/spoiler]
[youtube]link to embed video from youtube[/youtube]

3. HeroesWorld pages have been added to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube; there is no content there yet, but future news may be published there. A list of all HeroesWorld resources is available on a separate page https://heroesworld.net in a minimalist version.

On June 11, 2020, a problem occurred with the renewal of the heroesworld.ru domain (the old domain registrar closed, and the domain was transferred to a new registrar, which caused confusion with the domain renewal). All necessary actions have already been taken, and the service should be restored soon. To minimize similar problems in the future, permanent mirrors have been added for access to HeroesWorld: https://heroesworld.net.ru https://forum.heroesworld.net.ru You can already use them now while the main .ru domain is unavailable, but they will remain even after the issue with it is resolved, for added reliability.

Not so long ago, the forum was adapted for mobile devices.

Now, the performance of the forum pages has been optimized.

Performance was measured using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, which has two types of measurements:

• performance on mobile devices (mobile)
• performance on PC devices (desktop)

Good results were achieved.

Now it should be more convenient to use the forum both on mobile devices and on PCs.

• The Mobile index changed from 24 to 79 📈
• The Desktop index changed from 68 to 96 📈

In the "Attachment Management" section of the advanced message editor, a very useful feature has been added — you can now insert an image from the clipboard. The functionality has been tested in FireFox and Chrome browsers.

It works well in combination with standard Windows programs such as Snipping Tool (Ножницы) and Snip & Sketch (Фрагмент и набросок) — you can simply cut out a part of the screen and paste it into "Attachment Management" using Ctrl + V

The editor tools now include the ability to use standard HTML 5 video/audio players built into the browser. All that is needed to use them is to specify a direct link to the audio/video.


You can do this directly from the attachments; to enable this, we've added the ability to upload mp4 and mp3 files.

On February 15-16, HeroesWorld was attacked by malicious spambots, the result of which led to problems on the server and depletion of file system resources.

For a long time, server recovery was carried out; this was a resource-intensive operation to clean the file system, which became a weak link at a time when the server still had to serve the website and forum (the website and forum frequently displayed 502 and 504 errors).

On April 10, the work on cleaning the file system was completed; about 8 million files were deleted, and now the server resources are freed up for normal operation. Also, there was a transition to more advanced software, providing greater protection against the problem that had to be faced.

At the moment, frequent errors (502 and 504) should stop, and the forum should function relatively normally.

If something stops working or works incorrectly, please write in a private message.

From 14:00 to 15:00, the website/forum may be completely unavailable due to hardware upgrades on the hosting server.

A button has been added to the message editor to insert "classic" forum emoticons

On April 13-14, the server was diagnosed by the hosting provider. After that, I compared the statistics for two periods: 1) before restoring the file system resources, updating the software, and performing the diagnosis. 2) after. The results are good. Starting from April 15, when the restoration work was completed and the server diagnosis by the hosting provider was finished, errors 502 and 504 are approaching zero.

A new rule regarding the portal has been added, which will take effect on September 21, 2024. https://forum.heroesworld.ru/faq.php?faq=hw_help#hw_help_rules_23 The corresponding item has been added to the list of violations.

🚀 Updates:

• User Agreement upon registration / portal rules (simplified as much as possible and adapted to modern realities). The text is available in Russian and English upon registration.
• Moderator Manual (simplified as much as possible and adapted to modern realities; moderation is available for all sections; the concepts of coordinator, section moderator, and sub-section moderator have been combined into one term - moderator; moderators whose last activity was before 2025 have been moved to the group of registered users).
• A privacy policy and cookie settings have been added to the bottom of the page, which allows us to say that it complies with GDPR standards.
• The violation system has been renamed to "Points and Restrictions System" or "Strike System" (simplified as much as possible; only the main items remain from the huge list of items; there is a separate button for spam bots to immediately block them when a violation is detected; points and the system are only for human accounts).

If you encounter errors, inaccuracies, problems with the current systems, manuals, rules, or if you have any suggestions, please write to PM.

HeroesWorld has moved to a new modern engine, which will allow us to maintain it much more efficiently and with less effort in the future. The need for an update was growing every year, as spam bots were attacking us harder and creating a lot of manual work, which was a heavy burden and took up a lot of time, while the outdated 2005-era engine no longer met modern security standards at all. Moreover, many accounts were being hacked due to weak passwords and the lack of 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication), after which they became distributors of spam on behalf of their owners.

Some important changes related to the server and security:

• If you have a weak password, the site engine will notify you about it; it is also recommended to enable 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) via profile settings https://heroesworld.ru/identity/account/manage/twofactorauthentication/

• You can log in using either email or username (unfortunately, some usernames were not supported by the engine due to special characters, so they were renamed to user + ID from the old forum); the username can be changed upon first login, and you can also set a DisplayName — there are no restrictions here like those that exist for usernames).

• Technically, the server can now handle several times greater load compared to the old engine, which should ensure more stable operation for all users.

• The built-in protection against spam bots already surpasses what we had before, and its flexibility will allow us to strengthen it without significant effort when bots learn to bypass it.

• The engine supports automatic translation, allowing immediate translation across two sites: .net and .ru (a user can always provide their own translation into the opposite language, in which case auto-translation is not used). There is no translation for private messages; this only works for public messages.

• Support for multiple user interface languages has also been added (but content is only English + Russian).

• If someone's email is out of date, you can log in by username as I wrote above, but I recommend setting a current email so that password recovery is possible; if there are any issues with this, write to us.

In addition to all this, the new engine allowed adding many new features, such as: Wiki, Knowledge Base, Content Grouping, and Search.

And most importantly, this new software is easy to modify and fully belongs to HeroesWorld, which will allow us not to waste efforts on uselessly patching holes in the ancient proprietary engine, but rather on improving the site and creating new features.

Immediately after the release, requests came in to create a classic theme, and here the new engine immediately showed itself in a good light, since adding a new theme is not a big problem — within just a few hours it was ready and available for use; if additional tuning is needed, write to us, we'll configure it perfectly 😉

The theme can be selected by clicking on your avatar in the top bar on a computer, or in the side panel on the right on mobile devices.