The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

After more than a year of work, Vampire Rave 2.0 is here. I hope you enjoy the new site.

A lot of work has gone into this project. However, I expect there to be a few problems that still need to be fixed. Please report any issues via Report a Bug.

Every single page of Vampire Rave has been re-written and that's why this process has taken so long. First and foremost, the site is now mobile-friendly. Vampire Rave looks great on phones, tablets, any type of device.

Since I had to re-write every page anyway, to make it all compatible with this new system, while I was working in sections I made improvements. In some areas, the improvements are minor. In other areas, the improvements are extensive. Areas that have extensive improvements include:

• File storage (Premium, Houses, Mentorships)

• The Forum

• Journals

• Portfolios

I'm not done releasing updates. Over the coming year I plan on numerous new features for Vampire Rave. There is a new page, Updates, where you can read up on everything that has been done so far. As I complete more work, I'll be posting it there.

If you are a Premium Member and have skinned your Profile, you may need to make some minor adjustments to your profile code. Please review this page. It has instructions and all the information you need. The changes you may need to make are minor.

Other Dark Network sites are impacted by this change to Vampire Rave. Effective immediately, SciFi Section, Bloody Feather, and Power Punks are shutting down. You will be able to access their various databases via the Vampire Database, then change the database.

All of the unique features of the above mentioned sites will be rolled into Vampire Rave in the coming weeks and months. SciFi Section groups will be imported into Vampire Rave. Everything that was unique about the other sites will be brought here.

After that is completed, the other sites will reopen under a new design and format. This will probably happen in the very latter part of this year.

My goal is to strengthen Vampire Rave. I will continue to post to this thread as major changes and updates are implemented in the future.

I tried to keep everything as backward compatible as possible. However, there are a few things that had to be changed and I couldn't maintain compatibility.

One is the new CSS classes, for skins and profiles, outlined in the page I linked in the post above.

Another is Alliance/Society (not Mentorship) crest code. The HTML code changed. It had to change. If you have crest code in your profile you need to update it. Go to your Society, click on Crest and get the new code.

If you're viewing pages at VR, any layout, and the pages tend to extend down vertically... Where you have to scroll and scroll and scroll... This issue is probably due to an outdated browser.

That's not how the site is suppose to look.

Update your browser.

SSL site encryption has been enabled. This is a big change and has numerous implications. Basically, when you come to Vampire Rave now your connection is via https:// (before it was http://). If you look in the URL bar of your browser, you should see a little green padlock.

The encryption level is very strong. You can read an independent report on it here:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.vampirerave.com

PROs

• Strong SSL encryption site-wide.

• You can log in via public WiFi connections and not worry about your username/password being snooped and stolen.

• No more "Logging in via unsecured..." error messages in Chrome or Firefox.

• Encrypted content is not cached. This will hopefully eliminate many page caching errors that users have faced.

• Trust and Verification. When you come to VampireRave.com, you know you're really at VampireRave.com.

• Data Integrity. It is now impossible to modify Vampire Rave data between the server and user connection.

CONs

• If you read the report I linked above and scroll down to the section Handshake Simulation, it shows all the OS/Browser combinations that can no longer access Vampire Rave. Most notable are Android versions 4.3 and prior and various older versions of Internet Explorer. Any modern browser and OS will not have a problem.

• The old trick of username.vampirerave.com no longer works. This is where you could replace username with your VR username and quickly go to your profile.

• Various free image hosting solutions are no longer compatible with Vampire Rave.

Overall this is a very beneficial change for Vampire Rave. However, as with any change there are always downsides. In order to force SSL compliance across all Vampire Rave pages new changes had to be adopted. Vampire Rave lets you directly insert html code into various site pages. You can no longer insert non-SSL html code into Vampire Rave. If you try, Vampire Rave will re-write the code into SSL format. If the hosting provider does not support SSL, the code will not work.

This affects some of the free image host providers that many of you use. It does not affect Vampire Rave premium file storage. A breakdown of a few of the more popular image host providers:

imgbb.com works.

imgur.com works.

photobucket.com is hit and miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I have no idea why photobucket is so inconsistent.

tinypic.com does NOT work. They don't have SSL support.

Providers will either work or they won't. There's nothing you can do but try their code. If they don't have SSL support their images will not show up on Vampire Rave pages.

I've gone through every VR layout, public skin, and the layout packs. All are updated for SSL.

If you are using a custom skin and you do not see the VR green padlock in the URL bar, you will need to update your skin. All linked images and css files must be served over SSL.

If your profile is skinned and now broken, it's because you're trying to serve graphic or css files that are not served over SSL. This may relate to my previous post (free image host providers that are no longer compatible with Vampire Rave).

The easiest way to eliminate these issues is to use VR's free file storage for Premium Members. Put all graphics and css files in your file storage. It's all served over SSL. When you start linking to things outside of Vampire Rave you may have problems.