I have a number of changes and additions planned over the coming weeks - these are both aimed at improving the site in general, as well as improving loading speeds, bandwidth and performance.

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Forum Upgrade To YaBB SE
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If all goes according to plan, the forum will be completely replaced by a new PHP based version of the YaBB forum script. YaBB SE stores posts and topics in proper SQL database format, and not in flat text files like the current forum does. This means that YaBB SE is much, much faster, and takes up much less bandwidth than the current forum, which tends to grind to a halt when any significant traffic is on it. It can also handle far more traffic than is currently possible.

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Main Page - Portal Upgrade
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I have plans to make the front page into a true "portal", which will involve significant changes to both the layout and the code behind the news columns that is being used at the moment. The news column system will be greatly improved, and visitors will be able to register as a "site member", in the same way as there are forum members at the moment, so that they can post news comments and such. Further details of the front page ideas are sketchy, but the plan is to upgrade the site into a fully-fledged portal, with a considerable amount of dynamic content. The speed with which the front page loads should also be improved upon, through the replacement of Perl scripts with PHP.

I will post further information regarding these changes as things progress. It may be a while before any of them actually appear, so I thought I'd post this thread here to let you know what is being worked on at present.