UGX Forum

 - Discussion platform for over 500k users

Project Summary

2011 - todayMaintenance

The forum does exist since 2011. Four years later, the forum receives a major overhaul, with many custom written solutions, reworked mobile first design.

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Project Skills

JavaScript jQuery Design HTML5 WebSockets SCSS Task Runner Responsive Design SEO SCM (git) PHP Agile SCRUM Legal Optimization Team Management GDPR

Project Details

  • Maintaining old legacy code
  • Integration of Jira into Forum Code
  • Implemented major components like Blog System, Beta Redirect logic
  • Mobile first HTML5 theme, built with SCSS and Grunt
  • GDPR improvements & features were added

Project Information

The heart of UGX-Mods - the forum which was established in 2011.

It received an major (modernization) update in 2018 with many new features & improvements:

  • New HTML5 theme which is responsive and mobile ready (now you can browse on your phone without issues!)
    • New HTML Text Edtior (CKEditor) for creating and editing your topics and replies.
    • New gallery and slider options for images
    • Easy media embed with iframely, simply paste a link into the editor and magic happens
    • Autocomplete for emotes and widgets (try to type in : ) or #UGX and see what happens)
    • Full Emoji support & new emotes
  • Improved registration process for new users
    • Better client side validation (in general this effects many areas)
    • Email validation (no more typos and support requests)
    • Email registration check → we let you know about your status of your email
  • Beautiful HTML emails with nice links
  • Connect and authenticate with your social accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, Steam, etc.
    • Discord connection with our UGX Discord. Link your account and sync your forum groups with your Discord Account (you'll also receive the UGX Member role in Discord)
  • New Avatars and UserCard functionality
    • shows online state of user (green or red for online / offline) - in the future we want to extend this with the UGX Launcher.
    • click on any avatar to show the UserCard, to get more information about an user.
    • more avatar visibility! Yup we added support for your avatar to be displayed in many new places on the site.
  • Forum Index improvements
    • Child Boards can be viewed and entered directly from the index
  • Message index improvements
    • Preview of posts without navigating to the post (first and last message are shown)
  • Personal Messages improvements (mostly design)
  • Adding our very own blog which UGX-Mods doesn't use yet due to not enough time atm (sad)
  • User Interface improvements
    • new modern blue look
    • Custom dropdowns, checkboxes and radioboxes
    • better error, info, warning display
  • Offline mode & better caching
    • smaller total load helps to reduce bandwidth
    • in case you go offline the site shows a nicer offline site (great for mobile devices on the go)
  • Alerts
    • receive alerts & desktop notifications for subscribed boards / topics and other actions
      • The sound and the desktop notification can be disabled in your settings!
  • SEO improvements
    • link any ugx-mods.com url in Discord and such to show a nice preview. Forum posts actually show the first image if available (smile)
    • nicer URLs (with page title, etc.)
    • (lot of internal work has been made)
  • New landing page available under https://www.ugx-mods.com which will unite all our sites and with information about UGX-Mods.
  • UGX Roadmap at https://www.ugx-mods.com/roadmap
  • GDPR improvements
    • privacy settings
    • export personal data
    • overhaul of our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy
  • System improvements
    • automatic error reporting
  • Upcoming major additions in 2025
    • For 2025 some bigger changes are planned, involving a whole new user experience to find and download easily user generated content.