New Forum Features

[Paul]

As promised, here's the first in a few posts about the new features available since the forum upgrade..

New post editor

The new post editor has a much cleaner design, with all options in the same place, it also has an auto-save feature so should your internet drop out, or another problem stops the post you've written from being posted you will be able to retrieve the content of the post and re-post.

Within the editor you will see the 'my media' button, this allows you to quickly share any of your posts, blogs, attachments or galleries quickly within a post:

Clicking the button will bring up this screen, and from there you can choose what you would like to share:

Tags

When you post a new topic, there is now the option to add tags to your post:

These tags should be relevant one or two word keywords which describe the content of your post, this will allow groups of posts with similar content to be grouped together, the tags are then displayed both on the topic screen and on the right hand side of the forum index, with the most popular tags displayed in bolder/larger fonts at the top:

Clicking any of these will bring up a search screen with all the posts containing that tag.

Status updates

This has been moved to the top right of the screen, just click your name to see the option to update your status - if you've linked your forum account with twitter or facebook you can also update those statuses from here too. You will also be able to access a number of other settings from this part of the forum.

New content

Many of you like to use the view new content facility when coming onto the forums (top right of each page), previously this wasn't particularly configurable, but now you have several options down the left hand side to refine the results:

Topic preview

When browsing the forums, you now have the option to preview a topic before fully loading it - you will see an arrow display on the topic listing as you put your mouse over it:

Clicking that will open up the preview and from there you can decide whether to go into the topic:

Next batch to follow in the next few days...

[Somerset Squall]

As promised, here's the first in a few posts about the new features available since the forum upgrade..

New post editor

The new post editor has a much cleaner design, with all options in the same place, it also has an auto-save feature so should your internet drop out, or another problem stops the post you've written from being posted you will be able to retrieve the content of the post and re-post.

Thankyou! This is a great addition for me as I live out in the sticks and the internet connection leaves a lot to be desired, many a time I lost my entire posts due to connection failure. Very pleased

[Evening thunder]

I must say I do like the auto-save feature! I can imagine myself using this quite a lot as well.

[in the vale]

Did the Excitometer idea never get off the drawing board? I still think it would be a great feature (well, I would, wouldn't I?)!

[Richard Lake]

I love the new look of your forums, the header bar makes me think this site is built using Drupal. Alas outside of the forum itself, the other pages need a lot of work putting into them to keep the site design looking consistent. The joys of juggling two engines.

I praise you for removing the top horizontal from above the header as well as it didn't fit into the HTML5-look of the forum itself.

I would be a good idea as well to replace the 'IPS Community' logo with NetWeather's - I imagine this is already in the pipeline. Atm I look at the top of the page and wonder for a second am I on the correct site.