Serving the dragon otherkin community since January 1998.

Draconic News
Latest news
1-16-03, 12:00am: Automated signature size limits
A new signature system for Forums has been released. I'm sure some of you won't like it because you can't make the sigs as customized as before, but others will like it because you can create various types of sigs easily without knowing HTML.
Either way, the simplicity was necessary such that it can programatically limit signature size. There is no more signature reporting, which was leading to bad feelings and misunderstandings.
This change also required me to convert message.asp to message.php (the page used to read forum posts). Please e-mail me (kanis@draconic.com) if you see any new bugs on that page, or on the preferences page. To learn more, or if you have comments, please visit this thread.

One important thing: Please do not continue to paste little bits of text, such as your name, to the end of each post you make. This is essentially adding at least two extra lines to your signature (some text and a blank space before your real signature), and defeats the ability to limit signature sizes. Most especially, do not paste your entire signature to avoid the limitations of the signature system.

Also, if you really want to see someone else's name added to the vote on the right for new forum moderator, please post the nomination here. But do it quick.

12-13-02, 12:00am: IBM hard drives suck even more
Remember that refurbished IBM hard drive? Well, it died after about 3 weeks of use. This time they sent me a new hard drive. How kind of them. At any rate, being back in college is eating up just about all my free time. It's funny, because I remember having a lot of free time when I was at UCSD. Maybe my lack of time now is due to the fact I'm trying to get As instead of feeling miserable and scraping by with Cs in a fair number of cases. Bottom line is that I don't forsee getting much of anything done on Draconic whenever I'm in school, which is sad. However, since I do have some time now that I'm on Christmas break, I'll do my best to get something done, even if I can't finish it and make it public. Other than that, have a merry Christmas.
9-28-02, 12:00am: Draconic moving
Draconic will be moving this Friday morning to a new IP, 216.228.9.94. As such, it may be temporarily unavailable while servers are moved and while the new DNS entry propogates around.
Speaking of which, I've moved closer to where I'm going back to college, a process which took weeks of searching and moving stuff, and I'm now living with a new special person in my life, who I've also been spending a great deal of time with. These two things, along with having to replace and rebuild the IRC chat server and that discouraging hard drive crash (BTW, IBM had the nerve to send me back a refurbished hard drive instead of a new one, and it wasn't even _my_ hard drive, so all my data wasn't on it, and it makes strange noises that disturb me), all serve to explain why I didn't get Find a Dragon done this summer. *sigh* Sorry about that. Hopefully I'll have time to work on it during school whenever things finally settle down.
8-05-02, 12:00am: IBM hard drives suck
I'm very unhappy with IBM. IBM makes hard drives. IBM made my hard drive which died before the 1 yr warranty was up, losing all my data up to a 2 month old backup (I need to be as responsible with my main system backups as I am with Draconic). IBM received my drive early July 29th. IBM did not acknowledge receiving my drive until late on the 30th. IBM still has not shipped out a replacement drive as of today, and asks that I wait up to 14 business days (Ie. 20 real days) for them to get around to it. When Synge had this happen to his Maxtor drive, the drive was examined the day of delivery and a replacement was sent out the next day.
If I were you, I wouldn't buy IBM products.

Ha. I knew as soon as I posted this they would send the drive. 9 day turnaround. How... efficient.
Thanks to IBM, I lost a few days of work on a server side component to be used for Find a Dragon, and I was discouraged and working on getting my laptop set up to use as my main system for the next few days. Not a happy dragon.

7-23-02, 12:00am: More Forums changes
You may notice a few subtle changes to Discussions, like being able to click the topic as well as the "Message List" button, having an E-mail Replies checkbox when you make a post instead of having to go find the message to click E-mail Replies after you post it, and when you view posts in expanded view it will now "remember" the view you chose until you leave the board entirely. You can also set defaults for these last two things in the message board preferences section.
Also, 40% of users liked the idea of a link beneath each post to report signatures which are too large. That link is now available. Don't be afraid to click it and compare the signature size against some example signatures that will be shown to see if it's really too large. To make things clearer, you can also find these example images by clicking a link near where you enter your signature. 3% of users were against this idea completely, while 14% would support it if signature size limits were increased. 28% of users supported a similar idea to limit signature size, which means total support for some type of signature control was actually 68%.
Note that if you're a discussion board host or other type of admin, reporting a signature will cause it to be removed immediately instead of waiting for a few reports to come in.
7-11-02, 12:00am: Forums signatures and other updates
You can now use table tags in your Discussion board posts and especially signatures. Remember to keep your signatures to 150 pixels tall or less! You can use the new table tags to more easily place any text in your signature to the left or right of the image to save on height. I see so many people ignoring this rule (which was voted into effect awhile back) that I'm considering ways of further enforcing it. See the vote to the right for two possible ideas.
If you're wondering just how big 150x400 pixels is, here's what it looks like:

I think that's plenty large, personally. Any larger and you start just seeing the signature and not the post.
Also, someone found problems with the hotspots on some of the animated mouse cursors which are now fixed. Just re-download them. I also changed the names of the files to make them more consistent.
6-23-02, 12:00am: Dragon mouse cursors updated
I've updated the dragon mouse cursors to have the correct hotspot on win2k and winxp, as well as making animated gifs so you can see what they look like before downloading them. If you're using these cursors, or haven't heard of them before, check them out here. Hrm... My copy of IE 6 isn't making the animated gifs move unless I reload the pageā€¦
6-20-02, 12:00am: Find a Dragon proposed changes
I've posted a list of proposed changes to Find a Dragon. Please take a look and talk about anything you think is missing, or about anything you don't like about the suggested changes.
6-12-02, 12:00am: Eye of the Dragon
Oooo, playable demo of a new dragon game! Click here for the homepage, or here to download the demo off Draconic. This game seems rather slow and hard to play at first, but here's a couple hints to make it more exciting. First, click an icon in the lower right to change from follow camera to dragon camera, so that when you attack the camera doesn't move behind you and make it hard to see what you're attacking. You might also like the dragon eye camera. Second, use the slider in the lower right to change the time speed to 90% or higher, so things move at a faster pace. Check out this interview with the game's creator. What he says is neat. I don't plan to play this much until they release the real game, but if you have any more tips, feel free to e-mail me.
6-01-02, 12:00am: Back to college
Well, summer is here, and that means free time (I'm back in college, BTW =b ). So, I'd like to get at least one major thing done on Draconic. Go ahead and vote for what you think is most important on the right.

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