[Vash]

Yes, that time has finally come. I am currently in the process of merging OHM and O-F accounts. There are going to be a lot of changes on Orbit Hangar Mods and I know there will be a lot of questions, so I'm going to outline what will happen here.

UPDATE:
The account merge is now complete. If you encounter any problems, please contact me via PM or the contact page on the Orbit Hangar Mods web site. New account creation on OHM is disabled at this time.

Please refer to the sections of this post which apply to you.


All Orbiter-Forum Users
All Orbiter-Forum users will be able to use their existing account to log in at Orbit Hangar Mods. This will allow you to rate add-ons, post comments, and upload add-ons.


Add-on Developers
All users who have uploaded add-ons to the site and have linked their O-F and OHM accounts using the instructions from THIS thread will have their accounts renamed.

IMPORTANT: If your O-F username differs from your OHM username, then the author name on all of your add-ons will be changed to be the same as your O-F username. If this applies to you and you have links out which point to your OHM add-on page, then you will need to update your links so that they use your O-F username.

For Example: If your OHM username is "Bob", your current page link is: http://orbithangar.com/searchauth.php?search=bob - but if your O-F username is "George" and you have linked your OHM and O-F accounts, then you would need to update all of your links so that now they point to:
http://orbithangar.com/searchauth.php?search=george

If your OHM and O-F accounts are linked and have the same user name, you will notice no changes to your account. Just simply use your O-F password to log in at OHM.


Developers without an O-F account or an unlinked account
If you have an OHM account but do not have an O-F account or have not linked the accounts together, you will retain your current OHM account with no changes. All add-on developers will be encouraged to create an O-F account or to link their existing accounts, but this IS NOT mandatory.


OHM Users who have not uploaded add-ons
If you currently have an account at OHM but have not uploaded any add-ons, your account will be disabled. If you have an existing O-F account, please use that to log in at the OHM site. If you do not have an existing O-F account, you will be required to register for one if you wish to rate add-ons and post comments about add-ons.


New and future users
New users to the OHM web site will be encouraged to create an Orbiter-Forum account to log in with.

HOWEVER, recognizing that not all add-on developers may want to have an O-F account, users will be able to create an OHM-only account for the purpose of uploading add-ons.


Other site changes
Orbit Hangar Mods will see a few changes coming its way in the very near future.

Add-on Ratings
All logged in users will be able to very easily rate add-ons. This rating system will work in much the same way as the one on icanhazcheezburger.com.

Add-on Reviews
Recognizing the need to allow for a system which allows and encourages high-quality reviews of specific add-ons, Tex is adding a section to the "Articles" portion of the site. This will let O-F users post well-formed and peer-reviewed reviews of add-ons.

Add-on Comments
Separate from add-on reviews, add-on comments will allow O-F users to more casually express their opinion about an add-on. A single thread will be created for each add-on and users may post their comments to that thread. This system will modify and use the existing OHM New Releases forum. Each add-on on the OHM web site will have a link connecting it to its comments thread on the Orbiter Forum.

Add-on Bug Reports
This feature will be removed from the OHM web site. The add-on support forum already fulfills this role.


When will this happen?
I'm working on it right now. All account changes will be made in the next two days. The other site changes will happen over the course of this week.


Questions? Comments?
If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please feel free to post a reply to this thread, contact me via PM, or use the "Contact" page on the OHM web site.

Flowchart for the visually inclined:

[the.punk]

I have an OHM account with the same name as here but haven't uploaded addons yet. So my account will be deleted. But then replaced with the O-F account details. Right? So no changes exept password from O-F.

[Tex]

^ Exactly right. If your account name is the same on both sites then you will use your O-F password to log in on both sites once completed.

[woo482]

Sounds like it will be a nice change to O-F and OHM

[orb]

I have a question. I haven't linked the accounts, because the linkaccount had given me a blank page, either in IE, or in Firefox, or on different computers and with disabled firewall, since I tried to do it at the beginning of November. I didn't worry about it till now, but I wanted to know whether my accounts remain unlinked (and so the other password at OHM, since logins are the same) or not, until I manage to provide necessary data at the linkaccount page?

[Tex]

Originally Posted by orb

 I have a question. I haven't linked the accounts, because the linkaccount had given me a blank page, either in IE, or in Firefox, or on different computers and with disabled firewall, since I tried to do it at the beginning of November. I didn't worry about it till now, but I wanted to know whether my accounts remain unlinked (and so the other password at OHM, since logins are the same) or not, until I manage to provide necessary data at the linkaccount page?

That was my fault. The template for the link account page never got created for the Orbiter skin you're using. It should be fixed now so you can go ahead and link your accounts if you like.

[flying coffin]

I have a minor point about the bug reports. Sometimes that info for a particular add-on can be useful, for example: deciding which proton addon to use for the upcoming launch on Dec 29.

[Foofoo14]

Uhh i had no idea this was going on, and i have had my OHM account for a while, but it wont let me log on, and that link next to "for add-on developer" told me to type in my OHM account and it didn't recognize it, And no i did not forget the password or user name, nor incorrectly spell it. may i have some assistance?

[Tex]

Originally Posted by İİ14

 Uhh i had no idea this was going on, and i have had my OHM account for a while, but it wont let me log on, and that link next to "for add-on developer" told me to type in my OHM account and it didn't recognize it, And no i did not forget the password or user name, nor incorrectly spell it. may i have some assistance?

It's probably an issue with your username. We've already PMed you about that. Your username does not meet our regular expressions implemented so you will need to choose a different name. The only characters allowed are letters, numbers, space, hyphen, and underscore.

Another thing is if you never uploaded any addons at OHM, then your OHM account was disabled as mentioned in the original post. You now use your O-F username and password to log in at OHM.

[Vash]

Originally Posted by İİ14

 Uhh i had no idea this was going on, and i have had my OHM account for a while, but it wont let me log on, and that link next to "for add-on developer" told me to type in my OHM account and it didn't recognize it, And no i did not forget the password or user name, nor incorrectly spell it. may i have some assistance?

The notice for account merging went out almost a year ago. I have sent you a PM asking for a few more details so that I can get your account sorted out.

There were a few problems encountered with users who had non-standard characters in their user name. These will all have to be sorted out on a case-by-case basis.

[orb]

Originally Posted by Vash

 There were a few problems encountered with users who had non-standard characters in their user name. These will all have to be sorted out on a case-by-case basis.

This depends on how is user's name compared to the one stored in database. OHM & O-F sites are ISO8859-1 encoded, so better is to use only characters from that character set for logins and passwords, and the best only ASCII characters, that are common for all character sets.

For example, İİ upon login gets encoded in POST (and in GET for search function, at least for Firefox, which I just tested) to UTF-8 url-encoded sequence "%C6%92 %E2%88%9E %C6%92 %E2%88%9E" (spaces in between added for distinct character readability), and author name displayed on page is HTML-coded to "İİ", which even at first sight looks differently (i.e. 0x9e88e2 != 8734).

If database isn't UTF-8 encoded, but ISO8859-1 for example, and a query selects names, where name is string got from POST or GET that is only url-decoded, without character encoding conversions, it won't find any in the database, and hence the problems with logging in, or searching by author's name.

[Krys]

Orb - you spend too much time looking at characters :p

[tblaxland]

Originally Posted by orb

 This depends on how is user's name compared to the one stored in database. OHM & O-F sites are ISO8859-1 encoded, so better is to use only characters from that character set for logins and passwords, and the best only ASCII characters, that are common for all character sets.

FYI, some time ago we introduced restrictions on usernames for simplicity. They must match this regular expression:

^[a-zA-Z0-9 _-]+$

Unfortunately, some users already had registered with usernames that did not match that expression and they have been contacted individually so that we may change their usernames to something less prone to causing headaches.