v1.0.1: first patch after launch

I did not expect this many of you. Permaban is a game about reading a forum in 2007, made mostly by one person, and I went into launch week hoping a handful of people would find it. Instead the reviews, the discussion threads and the emails kept coming, from moderators who said it felt accurate to people who had never touched a forum and stuck with it anyway. Thank you. I read every one of them, and nearly everything in this patch comes straight from what you wrote. Keep it coming: the discussion board is the fastest way to reach me.

Included in v1.0.1:

• Threads no longer bill you for a fire you never saw. A thread heating up in the background could hit "flame war" and cost you reputation before a single post from it had reached your queue. Some of you read that as a hidden timer, and you were right. Now a thread cannot charge you until you have handled one of its posts. It still heats up on its own and the counter in the HUD still runs, but the bill waits until the fire is actually in front of you. Skipping a post from a burning thread still counts as handling it, so do not skip it. While we were there: the tag above a post now says which stage its thread is in, in the same colour as the HUD chip, and warning, censoring or banning a post from a hot thread tells you what it did to the heat.

• Wave 5 is a little easier. Several of you named it as the wall, unprompted. It is the shift where flame wars, sockpuppets and Thread Lock all arrive at the same time, and on top of that it asked for 70% accuracy where Wave 4 asks for 65%. The accuracy objective is now 65% on Wave 5 too. Everything else about the wave, and all of Wave 6, is unchanged.
• The board-is-down break. A lot of players never opened the link the admin sends and waited out a dead forum. He now gets to the point faster and repeats himself sooner, the ad on the error page shows up on the first retry, and the waits are shorter whether you play or not. Closing a pop-up on the games site no longer opens two more while you are trying to fly.
• Mine Sniffer was cutting off the bottom row of the grid. It is back, the frame sits on the window edge like it should, and the smiley is a proper face again :)
• Spider Solihair was dealing four suits on every difficulty, so "1 Suit" was a lie and Medium was Hard. Each difficulty now deals what it says. Undo goes all the way back, one move per click.
• Firevox now opens as tall as the forum window and its bars line up with it.
• Taskbar buttons no longer fall off the right edge. With five or more windows open, the last taskbar button was getting clipped off the end of the bar. In the worst case that was the admin's chat window during the board-is-down bit, which is exactly the window you need to get back to. Buttons now squeeze down evenly like they did on XP, all the way to just the icon if it comes to that, so every open window keeps a button you can click. Twelve fit before anything gets tight.

What's next. The first weeks were about fixing what you hit, and this patch is that. Two things I keep getting asked about:

Translations. Permaban is written in 2007 forum English, typos and slang included, and the posts are where the whole game lives, so this is not a matter of running the text through a translator. I am looking at what a real localisation would take, starting with Spanish. No date, and I would rather say nothing than promise one.

More things on the machine. There is a pinball table and a disk defragmenter that were both running before launch and got pulled so the release would ship on time. They are not gone, they are parked. There are also a few more programs on the drawing board that I will not name until they work.

If something in the game feels wrong, say so in the discussions. Most of what got fixed here was one person writing three sentences.

See you on the board.