As many of you noticed, our forums have undergone a significant upgrade. It's been almost 2 years since our last upgrade, so there are many new features - too many to mention them all. I did put together a list of the "best" new and different features, and I'm sure that you'll all find many more as you explore the forums on your own.

So, here are some of the significant new things you'll find here:

New and changed forum features

• There are new post formatting features available, including a new Spoiler Tag which can be used
  Click to reveal..

  to hide spoilers!
• You can set a mood icon that will appear next to your Display Name in your posts. Just click on the mood icon next to the logout link to set your mood!
• There are quite a few new settings in Preferences that you should check out.
• There is now an online/offline indicator for forum members next to their Display Name. A member will show as offline when they haven't refreshed their browser in the last 10 minutes, even though they are still logged on. Chatting in the Shout Box will not refresh online status.
• The New Post Icon (the blue notepad icon) next to a forum can now be double-clicked to mark everything in a forum and sub-forum as read. That will get rid of all those blue folders in the forum(s) that you want to reset.
• The user list now has a little search window that helps you quickly find the member you're looking for. You also have more options when viewing a member's posts.
• To see the details about who is online, click the title of the Who's Online box, instead of clicking on the Details link.
• If you're typing in the Quick Reply box and decide that you want to do some formatting of your post, you can click on the Switch to Full Reply button. The text that you entered will be preserved, and you will be able to access the full reply formatting options.

Private Messages

• You can set your preferences to receive an email notification when you receive a new PM, which will contain a preview of the message.
• Private messages now display remaining participants on the list of PMs. In addition, when you remove yourself from a PM topic, a post is placed in the PM thread to automatically let everyone know that you have left the topic.
• You can now email an entire Private Message thread to yourself, which will help you easily save your favorite PMs!

Thank you Lady!

Thank you Lady.

Barbara's been a busy bee; busy as a beaver building.

I think I've just finished checking/changing the last of the forum settings for all of the forums! The new software is great, but maaaaan are there a lot of settings!

LOL, I can only imagine!

Thank you so much for all you hard work Lady!

I still want to know where you get all your energy, Barbara. If we could bottle it; we could be rich.

Wowsaz the new features are great!!! I totally live the mood setting

Thanks Lady for putting in your time and effort into making the forums even awesomer than they already are

Oooh!

Thanks a lot, Barbara!!

Great Job as usual!!!

It is a great job you done LadyCFII

It is Great!!!

only one complaint: the forums siggys are 100 chars can you put it back to 300 or at least 200 plz

I have a question when I look at who's online what are search spiders?

Search spiders are programs that crawl over webpages, collecting information to keep search results up-to-date.

Good job LadyCFII

I love the new changes, especially the mood smiley and the spoiler boxes.

Took a couple of days to get used to, but I really like how easy it is to find specific threads or post now. The speed increase is much appreciated as well. Thank you for your hard work Lady!

To be honest, I didn't notice a lot of the differences - without this thread, I would have missed most of them .

I like the improvements, though - can't wait to explore more of them!

I just have one question. How do you change your stauts? Like some people are sleepy, mad and the other smileys.

Beside the logout button, there is a smiley. Click it and then choose your smiley, then click change smiley.

it changed now lol

That doesn't seek to 'stick', though. There are a couple of forums I'm not interested in, and I've been double-clicking on their blue icons to mark them as read. However, when I return to the forums index page later on, the blue icons are back, even though no new posts have been made.

This is the same from home using Firefox and from work using IE6, so it is presumably not a browser issue.

I've noticed the same thing. I guess this version of UBB.threads has its own set of glitches, just like the last one did.

Cool!

It only seems to be two forums where double-clicking on the blue icons doesn't stick: Fan Fiction and Off-Topic. A couple of others seem to work OK.

Interesting that it's those forums. Those are the ones with subforums.

It certainly has changed and for the better too!!

Umm, I hate to sound dumb, but could anyone tell me what those Spiders are doing Online? This is the first time I have noticed them

I think they're checking out the forums because of google or yahoo.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of Web crawlers (also known as spiders) here.

It is ok but i like the old one better

Are they? That's probably the reason. I'll try marking the subforums read first, then the main forums. I'll report back ...

EDIT: Yes. It works if I mark the subforums as read, then the main forums. They stay as read!

Preety cool the new forums...& yes I know I ahve been AWOL........Hey moving sucks...

The forums look nice Lady CFII & everyone...

Barb

Thank you Barbara. I like to know these things

LOL it seems pretty strange having robots view the portal page.

Nice one Barbara . Congrats to you and all the others !