Hello!
Once again we've upgraded the forums to give you more options and a better experience. Most of the changes you'll see are minor, the biggest change you'll notice is that the speed of the forums is faster. This was no small feat, as the entire backend essentially needed to be rebuilt, while remaining seamless to you.
That said, there are few new features noteworthy of mentioning:
Reputation Enhancements
Our forum has featured a reputation system since last year, allowing members to give positive or negative reputation to posts.
In the last update, we enhanced this by adding a new way of viewing the reputation system, in terms of "liking" content as opposed to giving reputation, which is a more common social feature on websites today.
In this new release, we're adding two features to utilize the reputation system in content discovery.
Reputation in user's profile
We've added a new tab to the profile which allows you to see both the content that the member has most recently liked, as well as content the member has made which has been most recently liked.
The tabs at the top allow you to choose which application you want to view content from (forums, pictures, calendar, etc), and also toggle whether you want to see reputation given or reputation received.
Content with the highest reputation
In addition to the profile tab, we've also created a new page (the link to which appears in the footer next to the top posters, etc.) which shows the content which has the highest rating, or has been liked the most. Just like on the profile tab, you can toggle between which application for which you want to view the content.
Misc Enhancements
With every release, we like to spend some time identifying areas which can be improved slightly, and small feature suggestions we can use. This release is no exception, and I wanted to highlight just some of the smaller enhancements we've made to make the forums more powerful and easy to use.
Login autosave
In the update last winter, we introduced a login popup box when you click "Sign In" to make logging in faster. Previously, some browsers would not automatically fill in your username and password like they normally would.
We've changed the way this is loaded so that this is no longer the case. It still works exactly as it did before, except browsers will now be able to autofill your login details.
Emoticons in sigatures
Emoticons (smilies) are now supported in signatures.
Also Tagged With
We've introduced a killer new feature "Also tagged with". This pairs up perfectly with the tagging system to show a list of topics that share tags from the current topic. The matches are forum wide, so it doesn't just return matched topics from the forum you're in.
If you tag a lot of topics up, they'll now show cross referenced below the topic. This makes it easier to find similar posts and topics, especially when you’re researching specific subjects.
I hope you enjoy these new features!
Glenn
