Category: !announcements
It's been a busy weekend for me and my fingers hurt from coding. Here's a summary of changes moved into place in the past day.
COPPA: The Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act is a U.S. law which basically says "don't collect personal information from those under age 13 without going through enormous hastles." Given the sometimes mature nature of the content on this site, we thought it best to simply disallow such yung visitors. We recommend disney.com or something equally as boring. Verification of your date of birth was a necessary step in this process. While we must insist that it is valid, you can select how much of it is displayed to others.
Email addresses: First, you can now finally change your email address from your account settings. We want to make sure that you're able to be contacted, so we're now a lot more strict when it comes to invalid and unverified email addresses. If your email address is shown to be invalid, you will be unable to use the website until you enter and verify an email address. Of course you can choose whether or not to display your email address and whether or not to receive any site announcements sent via email. (I think we've sent maybe 3 such announcements in the last two years.)
A special thank you to a few denizens of Ventrilo for their assistance in testing these new features.