Castle Renovations

[Prof. Dario Brighton]

We are pleased to announce that we have made some updates to the website to improve the user experience. As the Groundskeeper of Hogwarts Online, I am proud to introduce these changes that we believe will enhance your time spent on the site.

We have updated the navigation to make it more user-friendly and intuitive. This means you can more easily find the pages you want to access, whether on a desktop or a mobile device. Our new navigation system also fully supports keyboard operation, ensuring that everyone can navigate the site with ease. Unread notification and message counts will now update in the background, so you can see updates in real time without needing to refresh the page.

In addition to the navigation updates, we are happy to announce that a new messaging system is currently nearing the end of development. Releasing it will be our next priority. We understand how important messaging is to our members, and we are excited to bring you a new system that will be reliable and efficient.

These changes are part of a larger plan to enhance the Hogwarts Online experience, and we will continue to improve the site.

We invite you to share your thoughts and suggestions with us via this Google Form. Your feedback is essential to help us prioritise the features and updates that are most important to our members. We encourage you to get involved and be part of shaping the future of Hogwarts Online.

Thank you for being a part of our community, and we hope you enjoy these updates.

[Prof. Dario Brighton]

Our new messaging system is now live!

The new system has been designed to be much faster, more reliable, and easier to navigate on mobile devices. We’re hoping it should make asking questions and chatting with friends a much more enjoyable experience.

If you spot any bugs or features that aren't working as they should, please let us know as soon as possible - the sooner we know, the sooner we can put things right. You can write to the Head Office, but we encourage you to fill out the form above.

The changes we’ve made include:

1. Messages are now paginated (divided into pages) which should make your inbox much quicker to load and easier to navigate.
2. You can now search your messages. At the moment, you can only search for terms in subject lines and the message preview, but expanding the search is on our list of possible improvements for the future.
3. You can quickly see when someone last looked at a conversation by hovering over or focusing their name in the top section of the conversation thread.
4. We’ve fixed two bugs with the previous system. It’s no longer possible to send duplicate messages by mistake. For messages with multiple links, we’ve solved the problem where all URLs would be replaced with the first one after sending.

Features that have stayed the same:

1. As before, you can send a group PM to up to 10 other members.
2. We still allow basic formatting: URLs will automatically become clickable when a message is sent and you can create a new paragraph by including 2 line breaks.

Class messages are no longer available as we’re looking into class messaging options that are more sustainable and easier for teachers.

We’re hoping to make further improvements down the line, so if there are features that you’d like to see, please let us know via the feedback form.

We’ve also made a minor update to the user navigation: you can now view the current HOL time by opening the dropdown menu under your username (the one that also links to your profile, settings, etc). Hopefully, this should make it a lot easier to keep track of those all-important homework deadlines!

Thank you all for your patience while the messaging system was unavailable and we hope you enjoy being able to chat with your fellow HOLers.