Quick update on the new forum!

[Jason Pipes]

Just a quick update to let you know that progress on the new server and the new forum is making great headway! We are nearing our donation goal to afford the move to the new server. We are also extensively testing the new forum software and getting it ready for the switch once the server is setup and ready to go. The new server and the new forum will be significantly faster, more powerful, safer, and will have many more exciting features like image attachments, a chat feature, powerful printing, bookmarking and archiving tools for each user to use individually, and much more! The switch over to the new server and the new forum will be as seamless as possible as your account info, the forum messages, and all the information on the site will not disappear in any way.

[Jason Pipes]

As a quick fyi, I also wanted to mention another nice feature of the new forum that is about to be launched. Users will now have the ability to add specific users to their list of friends so they can more easily follow their posts and discussions. In contrast users will also now be able to place users on their ignore list which will prevent messages from specific individuals from being seen if you so desire. If there is someone you want to read everything they post now you can easily do so, and if there is someone you would rather not see you never have to read their posts again.

Users will now also be able to flag messages for the admin and mods to review if there is something about a post that is not appropriate for the site, etc. Users can now be given warnings via the forum by the staff along with specific reasons why, and bannings can easily be put in place for 30 minutes or 30 years.

Searching and posting and editing messages will also be considerably faster. I was testing earlier today and things were shockingly faster on the new forum!

[Jason Pipes]

The exciting news keeps getting better (well, for techies and forum staff anyway I suppose).

Check out this neat new feature.

"The Moderation Queue is an area where topics and posts which need to be approved are listed. If a forum or user’s permissions are set to moderator queue all posts made in that forum or by this user will need to be approved by an administrator or moderator before they are displayed to other users."

This will be a helpful new tool for the forum staff!