The Foxhole

That's right, The Foxhole is definitely nothing like it looked like just yesterday. It might be even disturbing to some of our long time users. But the "reloaded" mention added to our logo is just there to stress how much the overhaul was complete. It's not only a new face design you're looking at, it's actually a whole new system. Believe me, it's not just a quick lifting that we got from a cheap plastic surgeon it's more like a complete brain transplant (if such a thing was possible). So "why the change? I'm lost with this new design, what am I gonna do? Where are the painkillers?" That's the kind of questions that may pop up into some people mind... I'm about to go through this in detail.

Why the change?

It occurs following a little security related issue we had last December with the old system, issue through which I won't go here since it would be technically boring to most. Suffice it to say that during the last two years The Foxhole gained some popularity and we attracted the attention of new people some nice ones and some shady characters. You know what I'm talking about, mainly spammers. It appears that the old system was ill equipped to fight efficiently against this threat. Hopefully the new site comes with added security which will avoid further problems and helps to combat the real plague that spammers are on the web today.

What about the content?

The two last weeks were busy ones as all the main content from the old site was imported to the new one. What you will find in The Foxhole "reloaded": all the reviews, featured articles and the news starting with 2008. What you won't find: the news from 2006 and 2007 (these might be imported later or not at all, we'll see).

What about my account? (if you were a registered user of the old site?)

Sadly we couldn't move our old user database to the new system so if you were a registered user of the old site and want to register again, now would be a good time to do so. But before you happily jump on a register link let me state one thing: unlike our forum, being a registered user here won't give you any additional features. The content you can see not being logged in is exactly the same that you will see once logged in.

However, in the future we might implement more features that would require a registration to be accessed. When and if this is the case, we'll inform you about that. Meanwhile rest assured that for now a registration is not required.

What are the benefits of the "reloaded" version of The Foxhole?

Aside the added security and from the staff point of view, there are features allowing us to work much more easily on the site content than what the old system had to offer.

From a user point of view, the new Foxhole is of a much lighter and less cumbersome design and absolutely any of the site content can be accessed from any page with the top menu bar you see just under our logo. Clicking on a button will lead you directly to the general section indicated on it. If a menu appears (for some of the buttons) you'll be able to navigate directly to the category you want. If for example you wanted to see only our news related to First Person Games you would just move your mouse over the "News" button of the bar and in the menu that appears you would choose "First Person Games". You would then directly reach all the news only linked to first person games. And if you wanted to review all the news published, you would just click on the "News" button.

There's no loss of functionality compared to the old site and when you'll get used to it you'll find the "reloaded" version much easier to navigate. Additionally there is a nice new feature (that we'll consider "beta" for now) which is our global search powered by Google™. Previously when you wanted to search The Foxhole, you could only search either the main site or the forum but not both. Now it is possible to search both assets from a single page. Even more you can search the web without leaving The Foxhole (well except if you really want to go elsewhere, that is). Don't expect this new feature to be pretty accurate in a first time, the "reloaded" version of The Foxhole is new and Google did not had the time to index the new stuff yet so the links they have are still the old ones but it will get better with time. However The Foxhole Forum is correctly indexed and the search via the global search feature is almost as good as the search feature of the Forum itself.

What about the "Contact Us" button?

Well, this is a new feature that couldn't be implemented on the old site because it would have been a real spammer invitation. The "Contact Us" button leads you to a page from which you can send us a message via a form. The neat thing about it is that even if the system knows all of our email addresses (and users ones) none of them are displayed on the site at any moment which actually complicates a lot the task of bots crawling the web in search for emails addresses to collect. When you use a "Contact Us" form, the system will read the appropriate address directly from the database after you've hit the "Send" button, this way the address is never accessible to bots neither in a visible nor invisible (HTML code) way.

Well yeah, that's about it for now. Bear with us while we are fine tuning some of the site, the paint may still be fresh in some corners.

Enjoy your first visit, sit down and relax, have a drink and get used to it.