If I had a slower schedule today, I'd totally write this article as a poem, but I've got way too much to do, so I'll just use traditional prose to relay the message. THE FORUM IS BACK!!!! And I don't care what you say, that's well worth going all caps over.
Now, those of you who have visited the forum in the last 24 hours probably noticed that it looked a little different. It's changed colors to a boring, generic forum-blue, but that's alright. We can change the aesthetics of it. There are some bigger differences as well, though. A few new features and functions have shown up and I wanted to take a second to point out a few of them.
I should note that I've only been goofing around with it a little so there may be some new features that I'm not yet aware of. If you've noticed any changes that I missed, please leave them in the comments section below.
Friending/Ignoring:
So now, apparently, you can "friend" people on the forum. When you see their posts, along the top of bar, you'll see two new options. There are buttons for "Add as Friend" and "Ignore Member".
I'm kind of hoping we don't find a lot of use for the "Ignore Member" button, but the friending thing is actually pretty cool. Unlike Facebook and the like, there's no need for the friend in question to confirm your friend request. This is really just a convenient way to sort your forum pals.
You can access your friend list from your profile so it can make sending pms and checking up on people's posts a lot easier.
Who Visited Today?
I think this is my favorite new feature. At the very bottom of the main page of the forum is a list of every registered member who visited so far that day. It resets everyday, but it finally gives everyone a way to know if somebody's stopped in and not posted.
Color Coded Ranks:
Throughout the forum now, it color codes member's names based on Forum Rank. This is a pretty basic feature that every forum on earth already had, but we're just now getting it. So now jammers and maniacs show up as green, veterans as blue, forum leaders are yellow and Myachi Masters are red. I don't know how useful this is, but it's kind of cool.
New Post Alerts:
Our forum is still a bit convoluted with a ton of subforums on every subject. In the past it could be a real pain to catch up with everything new on the forum. Now you can do much of that at a glance. On the main page, there are boxes to the left of each subforum. If the box is white than nothing has been added since the last time you checked. If it's blue, there are new posts and/or threads.
This also extends to the actual subforums, too. When you click on "General Discussion", for example, you'll be greeted with a series of different icons along the left side. I can't say that I've got them all figured out, but here's what I can tell you:
- A Red Dot will appear next to any thread that you've responded to so you can easily glance down and see what discussions you are and are not involved in.
- The Word New will appear on the little folder icon of any thread that's had a new responses added to it since the last time you checked it.
- Red Folders represent the "hot topics". So if the little folder icon is red, it means that the thread next to it has gotten a high number of responses recently.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this will be abused, but you now have the option to "rate" a topic with between one and five stars. When you click on a thread, you'll see the words "Rate Topic" on the top right of the screen. When you click on that, it will give you the option of rating it on a 5 star scale with 1 star being a "horrible" topic and 5 being an "excellent" topic.
The average rating of each topic is displayed to the right of the title on the main subforum page. This means that as you glance at the various topics, you can get an idea of what the other forum members think of them before you even click on them.
Like I said, this will probably be abused, but it can also be very helpful. This can save us a lot of the rampant topic closing and topic bashing that has taken place in the past. If you don't think a topic is useful or helpful, rather than leaving a diatribe for the news that started it, you can simply rank it at 1 star and maybe PM the poster to let them know why that thread probably won't be very popular with the community at large.
RSS Feed:
You can now also subscribe to the RSS feed from our forum. This will allow you to see what's new with the forum without even checking in. You can get updates on your homepage about new responses, topics, polls, etc.
You'll find the RSS button toward the bottom of the home page. Just scroll down until you see the "Who's Online" part. Right above that is a bar with the current time on the left. On the right is the RSS symbol:
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| And if you didn't already know what this was, I probably just solved a huge mystery for you. |
If you click on that image it will whisk you away to a page that shows all the most recent activity and gives you the option to subscribe to our feed or to add it to your iGoogle homepage (but for that, you'll need an iGoogle homepage). Doing so makes it way easier to keep up with what's new with the forums.
Quick Reply:
Another function that everyone but us already had. The quick reply box appears at the bottom of every thread. This basically just allows you to leave a response without bothering to go to the formal "respond" page. This saves you some time if you just have something quick to say that won't require any emoticons, quotes, links or italics.
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Like I said, that's all I've seen so far, but there may be other little bonus features out there that I've yet to spot. If you see one, just leave it in the comments for all to enjoy.
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