The largest part of the forum and blog upgrade is now complete, however there are lots of small issues throughout the forum that I am working to fix.

Most of the new features are enabled and working, so feel free to try them out and please let me know if you come across any problems or errors. I will post a more detailed list of the new additions once everything is completed.

Most notably there are small design issues in various places due to the template changes as part of the upgrade, the forum topic rating system is also disabled temporarily, but should be up and running by later today.

The blog now features a host of new additions aswell, too many to list in fact, note that some of the content blocks added to blogs prior to this upgrade might need to be tweaked due to changes in the blog's design. Content blocks used as title bars for instance will now be found in the left hand blog column instead of above it.

There is a BIG difference now

I tried to log on when the upgrade was inprogress (could not get on) but when I just tried to I did not have to log on or I was already on.

so far, everything looks amazing... except for the blogs - for people who have "banners" on their blogs, as you have mentionned... well, the responses to their blogs aren't possible to read because they get cut off

oh, and I've just noticed that I have to download to get "ieSpell" for spell check? cool lol

Blogs look great SaRu!

I noticed the codes I use to centre my signature in posts aren't working when I look at my profile.

!

Yay...HTML!!!

Editing your signature there is no way to check for length.

The comment cut-off isn't due to the banners, i'm not sure why it's doing that. I'm looking into it.



The provided spell checker will be removed and replaced with a newer version of the one we were using before which does not require any downloading.



Not sure why they're not working in the profile, i'll see what I can do.



Feature needs to be reinstalled, also on the to-do list.

Will the whole forum be getting the same look as the blogs?

No, although I might make a full-screen forum template at some point depending on how many people would be likely to use it.

Yikes! me again.

Can you set to default that a PM will automatically be saved to your sent file (like it was before)?



edit: I just saw the blog statistics. Looks good

It's on the list aswell.

I think this was covered above, but I just want to clarify: The blog weirdness is happening to everyone and it's not because of banners and pics on the side? Just double checking so I know I haven't somehow destroyed the forum.

Jenn- try removing your blog header until its fixed, as that worked for me.

SaRu-Quick edit doesn't work in the blogs

Hi Everybody! It's looking very good...I did notice that when I wanted to read Kratos' blog, it only was two inches wide and therefore cut off quite a bit. This has been ongoing and I just tried again and it is the same. Thanks!

Temp. fixed... moved the header.

The "my blog" link doesn't work.

Also... I just tried to post another comment on this... and it didn't put my text through. But it let me quote Ha Ha.

The forum looks much better! I just noticed the quick edit box! Very nice...Thanks sooo much Saruman! Very much appreciated.

Fixed:

• Member Panel on front page back online
• Spell Check works on quick reply (not in posts yet)
• A bug with page reloading is now resolved
• Reported posts are set up and working

Other issues are still being worked on, so please bear with me.

You're doing great, SaRuMaN!

can someone tell me what the "+" and "-" are when we post a reply? (under the reply box)

That's to make the posting box bigger or smaller, I think it's meant to be used if you're making a really lengthy post.

Fixed:

• Blog comments are no longer cut off, however blog owners with very long graphics in their left-hand content blocks should remove those images in order to prevent the blog from being distorted. Note that you can now click and drag content blocks from one place to another on both sides of the blog.

Fixed:

• 'My Blog' link working properly
• Blog comments no longer include signature graphics and profile quotes

Added:

• Forum rating system is now active, members can now 'rate' topics based on their value to the forum, more informative and helpful topics will receive higher ratings, useless topics will receive a much lower rating. This system is designed to help identify exceptional topics, giving members a good idea of where the most useful information is to be found.

Everything looks good so far, SaRuMaN!

I've noticed the improvements and they have come in 'pretty handy'!!

Keep Up The Good Work!

When you click on my blog it says something like access denied. I don't know.

But you do such a great job.

Are you not able to access your blog at all ?

I'm not sure about the new PM system; I liked the pink boxes, you couldn't miss them. These new little boxes are a bit fiddly.

Sorry to put a downer on things.

The reply box seems to be set to double line spacing too; can that be changed?

There seems to be a few problems with the rich text editor, so i'm going to set the editor to the normal text editor by default. The new rich text editor can still be enabled from the control panel for anyone who still wants to use it.

Changes:

• The ordinary text editor is now the default for all members, this was due to some browser incompatibilities for some users. You can change back to the rich text editor by selecting it from 'settings' in 'my controls'

Fixes:

• The spell checker is now fully functional on the default post text editor, click the 'abc' icon to check the spelling in your post.
• The 'check post length' option is working again also on the default post text editor.

everything looks beautifull...love the new changes good job!!

I noticed if you post in fast reply you get single spaces when you hit enter to move down a line however when you post in add reply you get double spaces if you hit enter.

I love that "Check Post Length" feature.. it's hilarious that one can post 1024000 characters... and this post is 177 characters long


great job.. I love it!

If only that feature was better known to some people ....

Hrm. Everything looks nice, but I just have one little issue. When I'm posting I'm used to using shortcuts for tags. alt+g to add an image, alt+h to add a link, etc. Those don't appear to work any more. Anyway this can be re-enabled?

One thing I've noticed, it seems to be a lot quicker loading, which is much appreciated.

It might be possible to find a modification to re-enable them, can't say i've ever used the shortcuts to be honest.

Will there be any new forums?

Yes several, once all the upgrade issues have been ironed out.

Nery nice! 3 cheers.

I love the new look and feel of the forums and blogs. Great job, and thanks for all the new goodies.

so we can't have a banner in oour blog at all anymore???

SaRuMaN, Maybe once IP Dynamic comes out you could buy & use it as the main page Vectura webmail would be a good add-on also, when it comes out. I love WYSIWYG so much I've just bought IPB SaRuMaN, could you add some RSS feed bots to post on the forum, like BBC RSS and Space.com RSS.

Actually I think the content block being above the blog was a bug with the template on the old version, it wasn't actually meant to be there. It was the right hand column displaying in the wrong place.

The way it is now is how it's supposed to be.

We use a custom built portal which is designed specifically for this site, so we don't actually need IP Dynamic.

Vectura webmail though sounds interesting, I had the announcement about that in my inbox this morning. An onsite email system is an interesting idea for the future.

I don't like the idea of using RSS bots in the forum though, our current news system is sufficient I think.

Vectura and IPD are what won me over to IPB indefinitely. You could make Vectura paid, as in have users subscribe to it for a monthly fee, like a yourname@unexplained-mystries.com email for oh say $7.95 monthly. It's what I'm gonna do.

This is truely excellent. I'm discovering all these new features everywhere and loving it. Oooh look, new colors and fonts!!

Hey here's a question. Is it, or would it be, possible to set a specific font and color, and then have that font/color etc be remembered for future posts?

SaRuMaN, WYSIWYG isn't working correctly, I'm afraid you haven't enabled it to work right in the ACP yet.

I wondered what the heck was going on. But the forum looks better now. Great job with the upgrades.

Thanks for the upgrades. Love the new Quick Edit function - that's gonna save some time

Pages seem to be taking a couple of seconds longer to download than they used to though (not sure if that's just me or there's something with the site). A couple of seconds isn't that much...... it's just strange, that's all.

Regards, PA

I need to check on something. And I'm not sure if it's the pages or my old eyes.

But does every other post in a thread have a lighter shade of blue than the one above and below? IE Darker lighter darker lighter and so on?

If not I need to see an optometrist.

All these new command buttons... life is good.

Sorry no, there isn't any way to do that.



Page loading times are the same as they were before, if it was going slower it was because you were accessing the site at peak time with a lot of people online.



Well spotted, it's actually meant to be like that, this is the first time i've kept the two different colours instead of making them both the same.



As I mentioned a few posts back, the WYSIWYG editor has been disabled by default due to problems with it working on some people's browsers. It is enabled in the ACP, but if you want to use it you need to select it manually from 'My Controls' in the 'Settings' section.

How does the rating system work?

Is it an average of all the ratings so far? I notice that you can change your rating so if a thread gets better or worse presumably you can change your rating of it accordingly, which will then affect the average.

Is this correct?

Yes it's the average of all the ratings, I might change some aspects of the rating system depending on how it goes, so that could change at some point. It is possible to have a rating only appear once a minimum number of ratings have been made for a particular topic. It is also possible not to allow members to change their rating of a topic, although I figured that it would better reflect the current state of a topic if ratings could be changed.