Forum Upgrade June 21, 2014

[Phillip]

We will be upgrading our forum software on Saturday morning. This upgrade will add some new features to our forum and also fix a few existing software bugs and add some improvements.

The upgrade will take several hours to complete so we will be off-line for awhile. During this time the forum will be inaccessible but you'll receive a notice that the forum will be back on-line as soon as possible.

Please follow our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts if you want to stay up-to-date with what's happening. We'll announce via social media when the forum is back on-line.

Thanks for your understanding while the upgrade is being performed.

 

[Phillip]

Our forum upgrade will begin at 12 pm central, 1 pm eastern. We'll be back on-line as soon as possible. Follow us via Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for updates.

 

[Phillip]

Our forum upgrade was successful. There is still a lot of tweaking to be done over the next few days so please be patient during the adjustment.

The following posts are just a few of the new features that have been added to the Muppet Central Forum.

Please "like" each of the following posts if you believe the new additions will be helpful. This will help us know what additions you find most beneficial.

 

[Phillip]

New Style

You'll immediately notice that we've updated our forum font family to take advantage of sans-serif fonts throughout. Line spacing has also been increased slightly for easier readability.

We've also added a little more separation between posts as they are now enclosed in rounded boxes. We will be testing this aspect of the design over the next few days as further tweaks may be made here.

The signature break is also more defined than it was previously.

 

[Phillip]

New Post Editor

We now have a new editor for posting messages. It is much faster using more robust code. For the most part, the editor simply shouldn't get in your way so in a sense, you shouldn't actually see much difference for the average post, except it should handle text much better than before.

Auto save drafts

While you are typing a message, now every 60 seconds, a draft of your message will be saved. If you reload the page later, your message will be automatically re-shown. Drafts will be automatically pruned over time.

Each draft is associated with your specific content, such as a thread, forum, or conversation. A draft reply that you start working on in thread 1 will not be shown in thread 2 and so forth.

Saving drafts happens automatically every 60 seconds as you are typing. You don't have to do anything else. You can also save or delete a draft at any time by clicking on the disk icon to save your post.

Display if messages have been posted since you started your message

Tied into the auto-saving, when you're writing a reply to a thread, our forum will now check to see if any new messages have been posted and display a note if there are. You can then display those new posts without reloading the page.

New smilie insertion

The smilie dropdown really didn't work well with all of our smilies. Clicking the smilie button in our new editor will now make accessing the smilies much easier. They'll immediately all be visible below your post for easier access.

@User tagging

While not directly related to the editor change, this is probably the best time to mention it. You can now use @Phillip style syntax to tag users in a post. Tagged users will receive an alert when they're tagged and have links directly to their profile.

 

[Phillip]

Responsive Design

Our new editor and the entire forum are now fully responsive allowing our forum to be easily accessible on tablets and mobile devices. You can now respond to Muppet Central posts from anywhere with your smart phone.

The responsive design even works on web browsers. If you are on a computer, resize your window to a smaller width and the page elements will resize (with the exception of fixed banners).

 

[Phillip]

Watch a forum

The forum watching system works rather similarly to the thread watching system, just on all content within a forum.

When you click the link to watch a forum, you'll see an overlay like this:

Forum notifications work identically to thread watching notifications: you'll only receive one about a thread until you view it on the forum.

Like threads, you can manage your watched forums in bulk via a dedicated page. This can also be used to simply filter only the forums you're interested in.

 

[Phillip]

Multi-Quote

Each post will now show a +/- button next to the normal "Reply" button. Clicking this will add the post to the multiquote system. When replying, you can chose which posts to quote, re-arrange them by dragging and dropping, or remove them all together. MultiQuote works across multiple pages and multiple threads.

 

[Phillip]

Today’s Birthdays

Due to popular request, member birthdays are now highlighted on the forum home page and also in the "members" section of our forum.

In order to have your birthday featured on our home page, you must have logged in to your account at least once in the last 365 days. All member birthdays are currently featured in the "members" section regardless of last login date.

 

[Phillip]

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