First established in 2004 but with the plans revised to its present form in 2006, the Hangman Gaming and Software Community is a global community originating from Britain, dedicated to creating, sharing and improving Games and Software of various kinds. The intention of the Community, who's name is often abbreviated to Hangman GSC, is to create a public forum where anyone can distribute their own games and software to the public; and in return hear from the public how useful or enjoyable the product is and if anything can be done to improve it.
Project Hangman.com is the first official domain that the community has owned, but marks the fifth website we've had (a full overview of our past can be found on the page, "The History of Project Hangman"). This new website allows a greater emphasis on the Community, and has much better file hosting tools.
So why "Hangman"? As you may have guessed, the name comes from the traditional paper-and-pencil game of the same name. This simple invention has been the inspiration for many books, TV Shows, even other games and software; and proves, beyond all doubt, that sometimes, the best ideas start small and simple. Here in Hangman, we also believe that the best inventions can start from the simplest ideas by the smallest groups - and that is why Hangman is in our name and in our logo. This Community is all about highlighting new projects and ideas people have that AREN'T in the mainstream, and let them get the feedback and motivation they need to help them grow the projects to something bigger. Because you never know where the next big thing will come from...
Share Yourself!
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Forum Reorganization
As well as being the main social hub of Project Hangman, allowing you to interact with the other members of the site both directly and indirectly and discuss most any topic that could come into your mind, Hangman's Forum serves a secondary purpose of allowing regular people to connect more closely to the people who not only provide the website and all the services Project Hangman has to offer, but also the variety of independent software developers who create the various games, software and flash animations that you've all come to take for granted; and thus create a solid bond between everyone Hangman is designed to cater for.
The problem is, for a while now, our Forum hasn't really been set up well for this purpose. Though we had a Bug Reporting section, for reporting problems and suggesting improvements for the things you've downloaded from our catalogue, there was nowhere simply to just post general feedback or make casual commentary on the things you've tried or say why you liked them. This was not a problem with feedback about Project Hangman itself, where there were three separate areas for posting specific topics - one for Bug Reporting, one for Suggestions, and one for General Questions - the problem here was they were scattered around; not clearly gathered into a single category on the Forum and therefore difficult to find.
With the retirement of the Hangman Mirror Service at the end of last year in response to the Download Catalogue opening up to a more managed software hosting environment, we recently retired the entire "Other Services" area of the Project Hangman Forum which was mainly dedicated to this service; and we decided that this would be a good time to rework the Forum completely to be more intuitive. So earlier today, the following tweaks were made:
The Forum section "Question Time" was moved to the "Project Hangman" section. The Question Time Forum is for asking questions about any part of the Project Hangman website and services and getting a public response. This move also gathers all of the site-related Forums into a single category;
The word "Our" was dropped from the title of the category "Our Games and Software" to emphasise the Forum is designed to talk about all software in the Game and Software catalogue, even if it wasn't developed by Hangman staff;
A "Suggestion Box" category was launched under the "Games and Software" category, for users to make suggestions for improving a Download and to get public feedback on suggestions;
An official thread has been started in "Suggestion Box" for anyone who thinks the Download Catalogue lacks categories to suggest new ones to see - this has also been linked to in the site's Main Menu under "Download Catalogue" to allow it to be found easily;
The "Online Arcade" category (for all discussions about the Online Arcade) was made more visible;
The "General Off-Topic Threads" section was moved to the top of the Off-Topic category, to fit accepted standards of putting general threads before specific ones.
We hope these improvements will make the Forum simpler, friendlier and easier to use by all of our visitors.
When we refreshed our website in the later part of last year to bring it up to date and working optimally again, we somehow managed to forget to set up the Hangman Forums to allow child categories, or categories within categories; causing all of the Forum categories to appear on the Main Index in no proper grouping and resulting in a very messy look which was also quite lengthy. Our sincerest apologies for this! The settings have now been changed, meaning that the Forum now should appear more condensed and better organised; and be easier to manage in the long run.
One thing you may have noticed on our refreshed website is that the panel to the right of the site with your User Options and so forth is decidedly different in appearance to what it used to be. Well, we discovered that the old User Info Panel was actually poorly optimized and was taking a while to run the scripts used to present all the options and get your Content Ranking - which was contributing to the site lag. For this reason, we've replaced it with a simpler, smarter, Ajax-based panel that, while not as feature-filled, still offers easy access to a great number of commonly-used features.
The new Ajax User Panel still provides the same quick login form and links to registration and password recovery as always, though there's now a small icon to display whether you're currently signed-in to an account or not. When logged in, though, the Panel is quite different. You'll see it now shows your country flag in the top-right corner if you have it set, for your own reference; and there are graphically pleasing buttons you can click to edit your profile, view the member's list and access your Personal Messenger inbox. Also, if you mouse over your avatar, you will see your total PM count and current IP address. We may add more features to the Panel eventually, but we want to ensure basic functionality first.
There is a small graphical glitch with the panel on some browsers, which we have noticed - because it splits your avatar into four pieces to provide the mouse-over effect, the avatar may appear slightly misshapen at times. This is due to the browser not fitting all the pieces together correctly and occasionally offsetting them, creating a slight duplication effect. We're looking into this, but at least it doesn't detract from the panel's overall usability.
I've also decided to retire the Content Ranking system of giving people points for certain contributions to the website; and granting them certain ranks based on their current score. The system was only used by the old panel and was never integrated with the site directly, so the ranks weren't indicated to the other users - making having one a futile exercise. In addition, the system was not designed to count the Download System as a contribution area - a major flaw since this is where the bulk of the action happens on Hangman - and modifying the system to change the value of each contribution or add new parts to it was incredibly tedious. We may consider adding a better system for acknowledging a user's contributions and activity level in the future, but no guarantees.
About a week or two ago, the Hangman Team came to the difficult decision to delete and re-install the PHP-Fusion software that powers the Hangman Gaming and Software Community Website, in order to fix lingering issues that had cropped up in recent site updates with poor page-load performance, scripts timing out and occasional loading issues. The database was backed up at the same time so that the new install would not mess with the database and the same one could be used later, to prevent database loss.
The reinstall was actually completed quite quickly and it seems that many of the issues we'd hoped to see fixed with the reset software were indeed resolved - the site now works faster, more reliably and doesn't break apart in places any more. Reinstalling the Download System and Online Arcade followed, as well as one or two other useful plugins - these took a little more time, but eventually the bulk of the site's content was returned.
However, there was one final step we hadn't counted on. Reinstalling the site had reset locale files used to provide text to the registration page, for example, making it impossible to use; and we also needed to re-add some modifications made by ourselves to add functionality of our own. Adding these took much longer than expected and resulted in the Hangman website being down for a rather significantly larger time-frame than we had originally expected.
We are very happy, therefore to announce today that the refreshing of the Hangman website has finally been completed and is back online for everyone. Sorry for the long downtime! However, you should find that you can now enjoy a faster, more reliable website with all the same features you love and less unnecessary stuff to slow down or bloat your experience. Enjoy!
Project Hangman recently migrated to a brand new web server, offering greater storage space - so we can host even more of your Game and Software projects on-site; and more RAM for faster speed. During the migration, however, a few issues cropped up that took the site offline for many hours. The Hangman Team would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. On the plus side, the site is now back up and more equipped to serve its users than ever before.
Online Arcade Gets More Games, More Genres, More Fun!
Hangman is pleased to announce the immediate launch of two new Categories of games to augment the already existing six in the Online Arcade. The first of the two new categories is Mixed Genre. This Category has been launched for the benefit of Flash Game developers who find it hard to give their game a category. Though empty for now, we hope that the category will soon find use as a home for games that don't neatly fit into the seven other categories now available or that fit two equally well.
The other of the two new categories is Seasonal Games, containing games themed around a certain time of the year. In response to the launch of this Category, Halloween Lich - previously classed as an Arcade Game - has now been reclassified a Seasonal game.
We have also added a few new games to the Arcade to widen the selection available. These include "Halloween Smash", a Halloween-themed match-three game to add to the "Seasonal" section (we will look for games from other times of the year in the future); and Spark Your Neurons, a Puzzle Game that's best described as Marble Solitaire against the clock. We hope to add even more games in the future and especially look forward to receiving submissions from independent Flash game developers who want to showcase their work - don't forget that you can submit your own game for potential inclusion using our Online Submission Form.
Unfortunately, with all the new games and Categories, there's also had to be a bit of throwing away as well. In recent weeks, the Arcade Game SpiderX - which was provided to us by Kongregate - has been having trouble with our Online Arcade system. The game contained online features to allow for sponsored advertising to be inserted into the game in a non-intrusive manner (which IS allowed - we only frown upon games who put sponsored ads blatantly into their game and offer no means to control them), as well as provide the Online High Score list built-in to the game and some other content. Unfortunately, recently it appears that the online features have changed - and it's been causing trouble, such as the game failing to continue loading once an advert ends or freezing entirely; or parts of the game appearing in the wrong size and making it hard to use. So, we've had to take the game out of the Online Arcade, at least for now.
We hope everyone enjoys the new features and games; and hope that our visitors continue to support the Online Arcade so it can grow further in future.
We have just upgraded the Site Software to the latest version, fixing some recently discovered security flaws. The updates were mostly minor, so should not affect usage of our website for the majority of our users, but please feel free to Contact Us if you notice a problem.
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