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Marina

Forum Upgraded + Some New Features

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Sluggish
Marina

The forum software is now upgraded :-)

 

I've still some more work to do on it and a few more changes to make which will take me a while yet, but the major work is done. Some of you may find that your Avatars are no longer showing. If that's the case, please go to your Profile in "My Controls" and edit your Avatar settings - the Avatar you used is still there, it's just that it got moved to another folder.

 

You will see there are quite a few changes and new features. Unfortunately, I haven't yet had time to make any new "FAQs" in the section on "How to use the Forum", but the main "Help" files on the top right will give you a basic idea of some of the changes.

 

Briefly, some new of the new features are:

 

- Profile. This has been revamped and includes all sorts of new and changed goodies. Please go to your Profiles as some things might need to be moved to new areas, such as the new "About Me" page, where you can write about yourself, almost like having a mini-webpage of your own.

 

- Ratings. One can now rate members and rate topics.

 

- "My Friends". You can choose to make any member a "friend". They will then show in your "My Friends" list. This list also acts rather like a list of contacts. If you had previously stored contacts in your PM system, they may now show in your "Friends" list.

 

- "Display Name". You can now choose to have a different name show in your posts from the name you chose as your username. If you do change it, please tell us what name you went under before as we won't otherwise know it's you, LOL!

 

- Editor (typing box for posts). It's much improved and with a much larger typing area which you can additionally make bigger or smaller.

 

- Multiple Attachments. Any attachments you upload are now stored in an attachment folder in your Profile, so you can always see what attachments you've uploaded. There is a size limit to the attachment folders, so if yours starts to get full, you'll need to delete older or no longer needed attachments.

 

You can upload more than one attachment per post too. Photos will no longer will be a clickable thumbnail but will show in full size in the post itself. If your photo is larger in pixels than a certain size, it will be automatically resized to fit the post area so that it doesn't force one to scroll sideways.

 

- Multiple Quoting. This might be a bit complicated for some of you but you can now quote more than one post in your replies. Click the Quote button for each of the posts you want to reply to in one go, then click "Add Reply". Please delete any of the quoted parts that you're not replying to, so that it doesn't make it too long to scroll down to see your reply.

 

- "Lo-Fi". At the bottom of every page is a link to "Lo-Fi Version". This changes the appearance of the forum to a very basic simple layout with nothing more than dark text on a white background, making it possibly easier to read for those who have vision or other problems with background colours. It's only available for reading, not for posting.

 

- Hiding Categories. At the top right of each category is a small red minus sign in a box. If you click on it, it will hide the forums in the categories. To expand it again, click on the small blue plus sign on the right.

 

- RSS, aka News Feeds, aka Syndication. You can now read the forums in an RSS feed reader. For the moment, only the MS Discussion sub-forum is available. I'll add more at a later date.

 

- Newsfeeds. The "News Items" sub-forum, which I haven't had the time or energy to add news items to for months now, is now bringing in news items via RSS newsfeeds from the MS Trust newsfeeds and other RSS newsfeeds to do with MS. So, these will now automatically be regularly updated daily.

 

- Calendar. This has been revamped as well.

 

- Email and PM. The buttons for Email and PM are no longer at the bottom of every post. This is a good thing as newbies would sometimes click these thinking it was how to reply to a post. Instead, one now sends an email or PM from the new drop-down box next to the member's name in each post.

 

- Subscribing to a forum or topic. It's now much easier to subscribe to these. At the top right of every forum and topic is a grey box for "Options" with a drop-down menu from where you can subscribe. Subscribing means that you can receive notification by email of new topics and replies.

 

- Notifications of new replies to topics. There are now more choices of how often you get notified, including a daily or weekly email digest of all new replies for the topics you've subscribed to.

 

There are other small new features here and there, just click around and you'll find them ;-)

 

The old "Larger Text Skin" will no longer work. However, I've made the fonts in topics and in the typing area a bit larger, which I hope will be of some help. At a later stage, I'll make some of the other fonts larger too. If it's still not large enough for you, please use the feature in Firefox of IE7 to enlarge text size.


Marina

(belated DX in June '05, SPMS)

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Sluggish
Marina

You may need to check your profiles as some settings, such as email notifications of new topics and topic replies etc, were reset to "None" during the upgrade. It would be a good idea to check your profiles anyway, being as there have been several new and changed features, so you may need to redo some parts of your profile and reset some of your settings.

 

It's also possible that some (older?) attachments got lost during the upgrade as well as it was a major upgrade involving several changes of folder locations on the webserver.


Marina

(belated DX in June '05, SPMS)

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