Forums and Profiles were updated today

Website and community improvements

I’ve made a substantial set of improvements to the FFB-Bridge website, particularly around the community forums and Profile Library.

This has involved much more than a visual redesign. I’ve also rebuilt a number of underlying workflows so the community can grow without becoming confusing, unreliable, or unnecessarily invasive.

A more complete forum experience

The forums should now behave much more like you would expect:

• You can upload images to a post.
• Uploaded images are decoded and then re-encoded after stripping all metadata (GPS locations, camera info, etc). This is done in memory during upload. No metadata is saved anywhere.
• Replies take you to the correct post and page.
• Every post has a durable link that continues to work if pagination changes.
• New-topic indicators clear after you open a discussion, including when returning with the browser’s back button or reading in another tab.
• You can select text in a post and quote it directly.
• A reply can include several quotations from one or more posts.
• Reply context and quotations are clearer and easier to remove before posting.
• The editor now has clearer Write and Preview views, with a more comfortable writing area.
• Markdown headings, lists, quotes, bold, italic, links, and code render properly.
• Preview uses the same renderer as the published post.
• Quoting, editing, deleting, reporting, Helpful votes, and accepted solutions work more consistently.
• Deleted posts disappear completely when they have no replies.
• A minimal removed-post marker remains only when needed to preserve the context of a live reply.
• Topic activity, reply counts, view counts, timestamps, and last-post information are easier to scan.
• Forum layouts and navigation have been improved across desktop and mobile.

Long discussions now use stable pagination, and links recalculate the correct location of a post rather than assuming it will always remain on the same page.

Better forum discovery

I’ve added several ways to find useful discussions:

• A combined latest-activity view.
• Filters for unanswered, solved, and unsolved discussions.
• More useful category sorting.
• Search across discussions, replies, profiles, profile discussions, and public member handles.
• Search results that link directly to the matching post instead of merely opening the first page of its topic.
• Dedicated Profile discussions in the main community area.
• Tracking-free Atom feeds for the whole community, individual categories, and profile discussions.

Search terms are not stored, and results are based on what you explicitly request—not a personalized recommendation profile.

Profile discussions are now part of the forum

Profile discussions are no longer isolated from the rest of the community.

When a profile is uploaded, the website now creates a linked discussion that:

• Announces the new profile.
• Appears in the forum’s Profile discussions section.
• Gives people a place to ask questions, compare tuning, and report problems.
• Links back to the canonical profile page.
• Uses the same replies, Helpful votes, watches, and durable post links as every other discussion.

I’ve also connected existing profiles to the forum without duplicating their existing comments.

A much better Profile Library

The Profile Library has received a major usability pass:

• A clearer semantic table makes profiles easier to compare.
• Profiles can be sorted by aircraft, title, simulator, hardware, date, reviews, discussion activity, and downloads.
• Sorting and filtering work through ordinary URLs and do not require JavaScript.
• Search covers more useful profile information.
• Aircraft, simulator, and hardware filters are easier to use.
• Recently uploaded profiles are easier to spot.
• Airplane and helicopter profiles use appropriate icons.
• Long names shorten cleanly when needed instead of overflowing their cells.
• The desktop table has clearer alignment and spacing.
• The mobile view is now a readable labelled layout, with profile details kept together instead of being clipped or scattered across the card.
• Reviews, discussions, revisions, and downloads work together more naturally.
• The redundant profiles already bundled with every FFB-Bridge installation have been removed from the public catalogue.
• I’ve added a new F/A-18E/F Super Hornet profile as an ordinary library profile.

The page has also been reworked behind the scenes so listing profiles does not load every JSON file or run a separate review query for every row. That matters as the library grows.

Profile revisions and author controls

Profiles now have a proper lifecycle rather than being one unchangeable upload:

• A profile keeps a stable identity and URL.
• Authors can publish updated revisions.
• Each revision preserves the exact original JSON.
• Changes can include a changelog.
• Previous published revisions remain available while the profile remains published.
• Authors can withdraw their profiles.
• Reviews remain deliberately simple: one rating and an optional short comment.
• Members can update or remove their own review.
• Authors cannot review their own profiles.
• Upload retries cannot accidentally create duplicate profiles.

Structurally valid profiles publish directly. There is no routine manual approval process or misleading “verified” badge. Unusual values can be shown as factual warnings without implying that somebody tested the profile.

Foundations for desktop integration

The website now has a versioned, read-only public Profile Library API. This provides a foundation for future in-app profile discovery, comparison, download, and update checking while keeping complete profiles freely available on the website.

It includes paginated profile metadata, revision details, exact revision downloads, stable hashes and ETags, compatibility information, and public aggregate ratings and download counts.

I’m also laying the groundwork for a much larger library. Aircraft identity and type will become structured catalogue data rather than something guessed independently from every profile name. This will let the library grow to hundreds of profiles while keeping aircraft, variants, simulators, and hardware consistent enough for useful future in-app matching.

The privacy posture remains deliberate

I’m not adding:

• Server-side records of every topic you read.
• “Who viewed this” lists.
• Per-member download histories.
• Behavioral recommendations.
• Public reputation scores or leaderboards.
• Follower graphs, presence indicators, or direct messages.
• Email tracking pixels or rewritten links.
• Stored search history.
• Third-party post images that reveal reader IP addresses.

The blue unread indicator uses a small, bounded record in your own browser so it can clear normally without sending a topic-by-topic reading history to the server. It does not synchronize across devices, and clearing browser storage simply resets it.

View counts, Helpful votes, review totals, ratings, and downloads remain aggregate facts about the content—not a history of individual people.

Still improving

There will undoubtedly still be rough edges. If you find something confusing or broken, please post about it.

Specific examples, screenshots, links, browser information, and a description of what you expected to happen are especially helpful.