bugs Simtropolis 9.0.x - Bugs & Issues Report Thread

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

I'm sorry, but I will keep bringing this up until you ban me...

It is still not possible to open text editing windows in the "Manage city journal" menu when clicked upon the normal way. The windows won't open, refreshing doesn't help.

Luckily, I found out that it is possible to open these text boxes after right-clicking on "Edit city journal" and then selecting the "Open in new window" option in browser. It's not the way an average user will go, though.

[catty-cb 4,393]

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Luckily, I found out that it is possible to open these text boxes after right-clicking on "Edit city journal" and then selecting the "Open in new window" option in browser. It's not the way an average user will go, though.

I've been having the same issue for years, not while editing a journal but usually when creating or editing a omnibus article or creating or editing a file, it seems to be related to the browser you use .... sorry i have never reported it cos I never really thought of it as a problem  just annoying .... pretty certain it only happens when I'm using firefox

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

11 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

I will keep bringing this up until you ban me...

Sounds good. Maybe as a monthly thing? We could try to synchronize it to when it would annoy me the most? 

Seriously tho, CB has looked into it and the trouble is it's inherent with the CKEditor which the board software uses. It's very, very difficult to manually upgrade it to another later version cause it's integrated into the codebase like vines wrapping around the bits and bytes. Also, it would need to be an older newer version, as it's now a commercial product (one reason why IPS switched to the other editor in their 5.0 release).

CB can patch up stuff, but motivation is REAL low to try to fix something when it's hard to even reliably reproduce the bug.

 

11 hours ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Luckily, I found out that it is possible to open these text boxes after right-clicking on "Edit city journal" and then selecting the "Open in new window" option in browser.

I'd be quite happy to have a work around that actually works. Sure, it's not ideal, but it gets the job done. 

 

Ok. C'ya next month. 

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

19 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Ok. C'ya next month.

Why not today...?

Ok, but seriously now, why are there no Christmas lights this year?  Somehow, it struck me only now... I didn't even notice earlier.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

9 minutes ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Ok, but seriously now, why are there no Christmas lights this year?

Life complications for both CB and me.  

(It still might be possible in the next few days, but trying to top last year puts on extra pressure and I'm just not sure how it'll go.)

[hugues aroux 3,784]

1 hour ago, TheMurderousCricket said:

Ok, but seriously now, why are there no Christmas lights this year?

And no snow either on the higher ground of the page ... that's global warming , my good sir!  What a pity... 

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Life complications for both CB and me.

Never mind the colored light bulbs (!)... take care, you two! 
 Let's make a date for spring... "Chocolate Easter Bell Explosion" .. Pull ! Yeaaaah...

[Kel9509 1,363]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

(It still might be possible in the next few days, but trying to top last year puts on extra pressure and I'm just not sure how it'll go.)

Last year was so incredible that I don't expect anyone thinks it can be topped.  Happy memories are better than creating more stress!

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Life complications for both CB and me.

Sorry to hear this. Indeed, I did notice that CB is away.

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

(It still might be possible in the next few days, but trying to top last year puts on extra pressure and I'm just not sure how it'll go.)

It doesn't have to be better or more impressive year-to-year. It's not a fifa opening ceremony. 

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

On 19/12/2025 at 7:25 PM, TheMurderousCricket said:

Is there any way to prevent the site from opening imgur (or other hosting site) when an image hosted there is clicked upon?

I ask this with regards to the city journaling. When clicked, images usually pop up in an extra window upon which users can click on them again in order to zoom them in. However, if a picture is hosted outside of Simtropolis, the standard zoom-in does not work and user is sent to external site instead (with the image still compressed, duh).

I'd sure be happy to avoid this, so that it's possible to view and inspect pictures within the site's limits. Is there any useful "magic" or coding that I can use while embedding or would that require making changes to the way our site as such works?

I'll look into this when I can. I believe it can be done, but indeed, will require a bit of custom coding.

As you say, currently it automatically links offsite for external images, which isn't ideal. One idea might be to have a little magnifying glass onto the image window (which the board software calls a Lightbox). Then it'd allow zooming in using a magnifier tool, and even maximising the image to the full screen width.

 

On 22/12/2025 at 4:40 PM, TheMurderousCricket said:

Ok, but seriously now, why are there no Christmas lights this year?  Somehow, it struck me only now... I didn't even notice earlier.

Yeah, my bad on that! As Cori mentioned, life's been more complicated this year. I'm hoping to find more time next year though for site projects.

For now I've enabled the old lights with no broken bulb counting. (And if you're curious, I just posted some more info here.)

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

8 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

For now I've enabled the old lights with no broken bulb counting.

Thaaaaank you. 

[simmering 2,638]

On 12/21/2025 at 10:20 AM, TheMurderousCricket said:

Luckily, I found out that it is possible to open these text boxes after right-clicking on "Edit city journal" and then selecting the "Open in new window" option in browser. It's not the way an average user will go, though.

Thank you, that helped a lot!

[Propfam 2,288]

As an almost a year hiatus guy, I can't fathom how slow ST becomes. I got slightly better internet than last year and yet the performance goes to the toilet. Not to mention, some pages are failed to load, which almost never happen in my life (aside from obvious slow connection, but that's at max more like 5 years ago). I know, the admins have done a great job to filter those clankers out. But, I don't think we should sacrifice performance for way more than adequate security. I think we should only apply security measures to guest and allegedly hacked accounts, not the well-abiding Simtropolitans.

Sorry for harsh words. Thanks.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

@Propfam

Welcome back.

Firstly, the new security measures are only applied to guests, while signed in users (including sc4pac downloads) receive an automatic bypass. The same applies to verified bots like Google and Bing, who are allowed to crawl and index the site as normal. Guests are challenged based on the nature of their request.

To give you some perspective on what's been happening behind the scenes, we hit a massive wall back in October 2025. We were being hammered by a huge volume of bots, often over 100 every single minute. These were sophisticated enough to bypass Cloudflare's standard WAF security, which has been a known issue affecting many other websites recently. They specifically targeted resource-heavy query strings, like ?do=findComment and similar URLs. This forces the server to do a lot of heavy lifting by searching the database for specific entries. Without intervention, that kind of bombardment was slowing the entire site down. It caused the exact crawl speeds and timeouts you mentioned. Before I implemented the new security system, the site was frequently slowed to a point where often nothing would load at all.

In response to this, I had to develop a custom security system as another layer of defence. It's been effective primarily because these bots have never encountered something like this before. Many bad bots are designed to defeat common web firewalls, but since we've built our own fortress, they do not (yet) know how to get into it. I'm continually evaluating to see whether the system needs further developing, to make sure we stay ahead of them.

As you can imagine, it is a never-ending battle with website security. Bad actors get smarter every day, so it becomes a constant challenge. Just yesterday, that system blocked over 10,000 bots. If those had interacted with our board software, the site would've significantly slowed (or even not loaded for anyone). These bots are now denied access immediately, which saves us from wasting valuable server resources on fake traffic which is of zero benefit to the ST community. While the security measures might add a slight layer of friction for guests, the alternative is letting resources be consumed into the void of cyberspace by bad actors.

Since implementing this new system, we've seen CPU load is significantly lower. So if anything, the site should on average load faster now than it used to. As I am sure you can appreciate, websites are incredibly complex systems and oftentimes there's no guarantee of perfectly smooth loading times. This is especially the case when there are limits of what our server can do. It's quite like a car engine. We can tune it and provide the best fuel possible, but it still has a physical limit on how much horsepower it produces. My priority is making sure this "horsepower" is used to serve pages to real people who have an interest in ST.

I'm a believer how site security should take priority over absolute performance. However, the data I've monitored suggests performance has actually improved, since we're stopping thousands of bad bots from overloading the server. By preventing that unnecessary strain, we're freeing resources that should make the site more stable for real users. While no system is perfect, the current setup ensures the site remains both more functional and protected.

It also seems like earlier you might've picked an inopportune moment to check the site. In the early hours of Sunday morning (USA time), our massive resource-intensive server backup is usually still running which definitely slows the site down. It is necessary to safeguard ST's data, but it certainly does not help the site load any faster during that timeframe. Even with that backup ongoing, the evidence shows the server handles requests more efficiently than it did previously. The goal is to prevent the site from being frequently slowed to a crawl by bots, and keep the performance more stable than it would be otherwise.

As the techy admin, it's my duty to safeguard the integrity of Simtropolis. To the best of my ability, that's continues to be a main goal.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

3 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Before I implemented the new security system, the site was frequently slowed to a point where often nothing would load at all.

I remember these times.

[nos.17 5,120]

Times do indeed be tough if you're fighting them bots. Just last year the SC4Devotion forums for setting a 20 year record for most active users online! 

And over 1100 today.

 

[CaptCity 4,753]

@Cyclone Boom and/or @CorinaMarie, or maybe another...?

I noticed this morning that the Club uploads are no longer appearing on the 'Newly Added Files' section of the Homepage as they had been. Just wondering if that was a purposeful 'flip of a switch', or a glitch...?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Just wondering if that was a purposeful 'flip of a switch', or a glitch...?

I'll go with glitch. There wouldn't be any reason I can think of to deliberately turn that off and even if there were, CB would've mentioned it to me. What I do know is Google changed their code for the embedded search box and made it just a boring plain rectangle and they took away all the suggestions as you type. CB then worked on that for a couple of days and got it all patched up with the code on our site so Google cannot bork its appearance again.

Additionally, he added some sort of image transfer code via RSS for the Discord peeps.

I'll speculate that one or the other of these code edits might've stepped on the Newly Added Files's toes.  

[CaptCity 4,753]

33 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I'll go with glitch. There wouldn't be any reason I can think of to deliberately turn that off...

Okay. Thought it might have been planned since uploading things through the clubs can appear to 'take over' the list at times. Probably a coincidence that it happened at the same time as several items were added through the Lost Content club. Not a big deal. Thanks.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

12 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Thought it might have been planned since uploading things through the clubs can appear to 'take over' the list at times.

As it happens, it was my doing and this was the exact reason. I noticed all the new restored items from the Found Custom Contents club, and figured while we appreciate those being shared, most members might prefer to see what's on the main STEX only. So I added a category filter to only list those on the homepage. When I did this, Cori had already gone to bed so that's why she didn't know and then later I forgot to mention it.

At some point I can revert it back to include Clubs, but figured it'd be better without at this point.

Another thought is I might be able to create a dedicated homepage files feed for Clubs only, so then we can have the best of both worlds.

[CaptCity 4,753]

1 hour ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Another thought is I might be able to create a dedicated homepage files feed for Clubs only, so then we can have the best of both worlds.

Hope that is doable (as long as there is no 'overtime' involved... ). That does sound like the best option.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

3 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Hope that is doable (as long as there is no 'overtime' involved... ). That does sound like the best option.

I avoiding spend all day (and all night) on it, so I finished my shift early. All sorted.

In the process I fixed a nagging template bug on the homepage with the secondary slider. That was being troublesome for a while.

[CaptCity 4,753]

8 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

...template bug on the homepage with the secondary slider. That was being troublesome for a while.

Wasn't aware of that one...

8 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

I avoiding spend all day (and all night) on it, so I finished my shift early. All sorted.

Forget overtime... You deserve a flat out raise!

Looks great!  

[CaptCity 4,753]

Hi all,

Is anyone able to access the 'Club' pages through the Home page tab? It is giving me the 'Page does not exist' error... I can get to them through the club download entries, but then the Club 'Home' tabs themselves give the same error.

Was just on some last night. Maybe a glitch on my end...?

Maybe related to the above discussion...? Although, I'm pretty sure I've used it since then.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

52 minutes ago, CaptCity said:

Maybe a glitch on my end...?

Maybe, but that is an IPS style error.

I tried it as me and then as a guest with no trouble so I've no idea what's going one.  

[Propfam 2,288]

2 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Hi all,

Is anyone able to access the 'Club' pages through the Home page tab? It is giving me the 'Page does not exist' error... I can get to them through the club download entries, but then the Club 'Home' tabs themselves give the same error.

Was just on some last night. Maybe a glitch on my end...?

Maybe related to the above discussion...? Although, I'm pretty sure I've used it since then.

Can second to that. I had a problem with the PM being erroneous. I wish I can post it here. But since it included a portion of PMs, I couldn't.

Update (@CaptCity): yes, refreshing doesn't solve problem. Heck visiting in different times doesn't solve it. So does better internet connection. I'd argue it's almost probably ST's fault, tho note that I have strict cookies settings since almost a year. But right before this, it didn't break at all.

[CaptCity 4,753]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Maybe, but that is an IPS style error.

I tried it as me and then as a guest with no trouble so I've no idea what's going one.  

Hmmm... Tried clearing browser... again... Reset router (our service had gone out recently)... Tried different (super secret account... ) and browser... All to no avail... curious...

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Is anyone able to access the 'Club' pages through the Home page tab?

We are talking about clicking here, yes?

[CaptCity 4,753]

Just now, CorinaMarie said:

We are talking about clicking here, yes?

Yes, selecting that tab will open the page listing all the clubs. However, when trying to select any of the clubs themselves, the error pops up.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Just now, CaptCity said:

Yes, selecting that tab will open the page listing all the clubs. However, when trying to select any of the clubs themselves, the error pops up.

Ah! Yeah, I get the same error now.  

[CaptCity 4,753]

Okay. Not happy there's a problem, but at least I know I'm not 'imagining' things...