Hey everyone, this is Loren from Donut Team and welcome to this thread.
Today, I'll be outlining some of our immediate plans going forward for our web services.
Why this thread?
In case you missed it: recently, our lead website developer, Jake, stepped down from his role here at Donut Team.This puts the continued maintenance of Donut Team web services on myself and the rest of the team and, in the time since Jake stepped down, we have prepared a number of changes and plans for the future.
This thread aims to detail some of those changes.
The New Donut Team About Site
We have created a brand new site that will live here at donutteam.com.We have dubbed this site the "About Site" because it aims to detail who we are and what we are all about. This new site will include all of the following at launch:
- A brand new, simple homepage with a couple sentences about who we are as well as a block about our community and a block about our latest mod release (currently, the Donut Mod 4: Level 2 Public Beta).
- A new "The Team" page that features a little bit about every member of our team and what their roles are.
- New "Tools", "Mods", "Mod Resources" and "Games" pages listing all of our releases under each of those categories.
- New "About Us" and "Contact Us" pages.
- Slightly Revised Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, Reverse Engineering Guidelines and Privacy Policy user agreements (more on this below).
Here is a sneak peak of the new Tools page:
Donut Team API v3
The Donut Team API has been rebuilt with full backwards compatibility for old endpoints. This new version has been dubbed v3.Currently, no v3 endpoints are available for public use but we hope to have more to announce on this in the future.
Donut Team Forum
A new home
The Donut Team Forum will be moving to the new forum.donutteam.com subdomain. Alongside this change, the About Site also contains logic to handle all old links from the main donutteam.com and redirect them to the correct places on forum.donutteam.com or new pages where applicable.Currently, that subdomain will just lead you to any exact copy of the current forum you are reading this on. However, that is not all we have planned for the forum in the immediate future:
Version 21.4
The forum will also be receiving a version bump to 21.4. This update does not bring anything in the way of new features but the major version has been bumped to coincide with various internal and user facing changes outlined below:General Changes
- Updated the site's favicon.
- Changed the page title separator from " - " to " | " for consistency with other Donut Team sites.
Navigation Changes
- Changed the logo in the upper left corner of the site to read "DT Forum".
- Removed the "Downloads" link from the navigation bar.
- Added the "Tools", "Mods", "Mod Resources" and "Games" links to the navigation bar. These are all external links to the About Site.
- Added the team's founding year, 2013, to the copyright date in the site's footer.
- Changed all of the footer links to point to their new, equivalent pages on the About Site.
Page Specific Changes
- Changed the page title for the forum's homepage from "Community Home" to "Home".
- Removed the "Community Forum" link from the forum's sidebar.
- Removed the homepage and a number of other pages that have instead been built in to the About Site.
- Updated the design of the 404 page slightly.
- Made it so the bans-on-record banner on user profiles is only visible to moderators and above.
Miscellaneous
Changed how Donut Bot loads welcome messages to untie them from website updates and make them easier to add and remove.Simplified Staff Hierarchy
As will soon be detailed on the About Site's Team page, the staff hierarchy of Donut Team has been greatly simplified.We've decided that, rather than trying to fit every staff member into rigid categories (Lead Staff, Development Staff, Moderation Staff & Quality Assurance Staff), we would rather just simply be called Staff and list what specific roles we each have on the Team page.
The one exception to this change is staff with moderation privileges are listed separately in the Discord server to make it clear who does and does not have powers there.
Simplified Community Guidelines & Other User Agreements
The Community Guidelines, as well as our other user agreements (Terms of Service, Reverse Engineering Guidelines and Privacy Policy) have all been revised slightly to streamline things and (hopefully) make them easier to digest.These will be available to read and review when the About Site launches and we will give you all a few days to do so before they go into effect.
That is everything I have to announce regarding the future of our web services today. All of these changes will be rolling out this Saturday, August 21st, 2021.
There will be a maintenance period beginning at 12:30 PM Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, August 21st, 2021 while we roll out these changes.
During this period, the Donut Team Forum and API (and by extension, services that use it such as SHAR MP and Cards Against Lucas) will be unavailable. We apologise in advanced for any inconvenience this may cause but we hope to have things back up and running fairly quickly!
Thank you for your continued support and we'd love to hear what you think below.
- Loren from Donut Team