Sharky
Staff
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Later tonight, between 2-3am GMT, the site will be taken offline to perform a fairly significant upgrade to the forum software. As always we'll try to keep downtime to a minimum, but we're anticipating about 2 hours when the site will be offline.
It's been a while since we last did an upgrade to the forums. Therefore this one contains a number of bug fixes and improvements to existing functionality.
The main sections which have been upgraded include:
Social Groups
Currently we have just a flat, non threaded message wall in the social groups. The wall is great for leaving messages such as 'hey, nice group!' but isn't that useful when it comes to actually having a meaningful discussion about the chosen topic. In order to greatly enhance the ability of social groups to allow users to talk about their common interests, the social group messages have been threaded with the use of 'discussions'.
By default, the user who created the group can moderate their discussions and the messages within them. Another permission allows users to configure their social groups so that only they can create discussions within that group. This allows users to create social groups with greater control over the subject matter. Because users can take control of their groups and can be given the primary responsibility for maintaining them, this also reduces the potential extra work for T2W staff and moderators.
Discussions and messages now also have several features from forums and threads. This creates an interesting scenario where group owners can now see how moderators work with the forums, and allows them to get involved in their own space. Features included:
Each Social Group will now also belong to a category. Categories allow users to find groups that are relevant to them, especially on larger boards. The categories are predefined by the T2W Staff. As well as providing suggestions to the users for the kind of groups they could create, this also allows us to encourage users to create social groups that are relevant to the board as a whole
Private Messaging
Blog
There's lots of other minor improvements too... enjoy!
It's been a while since we last did an upgrade to the forums. Therefore this one contains a number of bug fixes and improvements to existing functionality.
The main sections which have been upgraded include:
Social Groups
Currently we have just a flat, non threaded message wall in the social groups. The wall is great for leaving messages such as 'hey, nice group!' but isn't that useful when it comes to actually having a meaningful discussion about the chosen topic. In order to greatly enhance the ability of social groups to allow users to talk about their common interests, the social group messages have been threaded with the use of 'discussions'.
By default, the user who created the group can moderate their discussions and the messages within them. Another permission allows users to configure their social groups so that only they can create discussions within that group. This allows users to create social groups with greater control over the subject matter. Because users can take control of their groups and can be given the primary responsibility for maintaining them, this also reduces the potential extra work for T2W staff and moderators.
Discussions and messages now also have several features from forums and threads. This creates an interesting scenario where group owners can now see how moderators work with the forums, and allows them to get involved in their own space. Features included:
- - Full inline moderation (Discussions and Messages)
- - Quick Editing (Messages)
- - Subscriptions (Groups and Discussions)
- - E-mail Notifications (Discussions)
- - Social Bookmarking (Discussions)
- - Read Marking (Groups and Discussions)
Each Social Group will now also belong to a category. Categories allow users to find groups that are relevant to them, especially on larger boards. The categories are predefined by the T2W Staff. As well as providing suggestions to the users for the kind of groups they could create, this also allows us to encourage users to create social groups that are relevant to the board as a whole
Private Messaging
- - Read receipts are automatically accepted when a PM is replied to.
- - A new Quick Reply can be used to reply to PM's.
- - A new user option is available to set the default value for 'Save Copy' which is also used with Quick Reply.
- - PM's can be ordered by Title, Date and Sender.
- - When ordered, PM's are grouped by Title, Date or Sender.
- - Private Messages can be filtered by Sender, Title, a given date period, and whether the message has been read or not.
- - Message selections are remembered over multiple pages for bulk actions (Move, delete, mark as read etc).
Blog
- - Blog Customization - users may customize their blogs in all sorts of ways
- - Group Blogs - users may allow other users to post to their blog.
- - Sidebar Blocks - users may create custom blocks to display in their sidebar. These blocks can be rearranged by drag and drop.
- - Custom Pages - users may create custom pages to be displayed in their blog.
- - Tags - tag support has been included.
- - Featured Entry Manager - multiple entries can be featured on the blog home page now.
- - Private Entries - users may set specific entries to be private while leaving their blog open.
- - Categories - T2W staff can now define categories.
There's lots of other minor improvements too... enjoy!
