New Muppet Central Forum Features

[Phillip]

Welcome to the new Muppet Central Forum. We announced two months ago that major upgrades to the forum were coming. Many months of work have gone into researching and finding the best forum software available for our needs now and in the future. We hope that you like the results. We believe that the more you use our new forum, the more you'll like it.

There are several things of immediate note...

(1) Our forum has moved to a new URL. There are many links throughout the main site which will be updated throughout the next few days to point to our new address.

http://www.muppetcentral.com/forum

(2) Later today, links to threads in our vBulletin forum should automatically redirect to the corresponding thread in our new forum.

(3) There are many, many new features. I will highlight a few of them in the next few posts. As you look around, you'll discover many more changes and updates.

(4) We will continue to tweak settings in the next few days. Thank you in advance for your understanding. Your feedback will play a big role in helping us to improve all areas of the forum.

(5) A few features (like our custom profile fields that ask Muppet questions) are not yet active. These will be added in a future update.

(6) We now have "personal conversations" instead of "private messages". These new conversations will be threaded and much more natural like posts in a forum. Because our old "private messages" were not moved over, if you need any of your PM's from the old board, please click on the "contact us" link in the bottom right of this page in the blue area or click here and we'll help you get what you need. Old PM's will be retrievable for the next 30 days or so.

(7) The first time you login, you may notice "new member" by your posts or on your account profile. Shortly after your first login, this will be updated to the proper status. This will only happen once and your account will have the right status from now on.

(8) Even though for the moment the software will let you put photos in signatures, at this time we will keep the same rules for signatures as before. In the future if there is a way to keep signature images to a consistent size or add additional images to profiles, we'll consider such options. Thanks for your understanding.

You can find out more about these updates below and discuss all of our new features here.

 

[Phillip]

Photos and Video

Photos and video from external sites can now be linked directly to your posts.

Here's an example image...

There are several cool things to note about images. They are automatically resized to fit the forum width (to prevent scrolling). Also if you click on an area of a photo, you will automatically zoom in to that part of the photo at it's actual resolution. For example click on a particular Muppet in the above picture and the image will zoom in to that area of the photo.

An here's an example video embedded into a post...

*Photos and videos need to be family friendly and abide by our forum rules. If you have a concern about a post, as always please use the "report" a post feature.

 

[Phillip]

Alerts

An alerts system, similar to Facebook’s notifications, keeps users up to date with replies to watched topics, posts where there are quotes and other occurrences. A notification system like this is helpful for these minor actions, but not so significant that you would want an email.

 

[Phillip]

Trophies

Trophies are another new feature allowing members to receive awards for completing various actions on the forum. (This is similar to achievements on Xbox Live, trophies on the PlayStation Network and badges on Stack Exchange.) It's just a fun way to recognize folks involved in our forum.

Trophies are also linked to the user title ladder, replacing the more traditional post count method. This is a more balanced way of determining member status. It's not just based on post counts but it includes all involvement and interaction in the forum.

I'm considering renaming these from "Trophies" to "Fred Awards"...

 

[Phillip]

Like Posts

You can now ‘Like’ a post. Forum software has had reputation and rating systems for years, but they typically require too much effort to use and little incentive to do so. Only a single click is required below each post to provide feedback to the poster that you liked their message.

 

[Phillip]

Member Card

Wherever you see a username or an avatar, clicking it will open that user's member card.

The member card is a small summary of a user's profile, showing various commonly-viewed data, such as user title, gender, message count etc. along with the full size (but cropped to square) version of the user's avatar. Clicking on the username or the 'View Profile Page' link will load the user's full profile page.

There are various useful links on the member card, including links to follow or unfollow the user, start a conversation with them, view their recently-posted messages, or see a summary of the trophies they have accumulated.

 

[Phillip]

News Feed

In each of your profiles, you have a customized news feed. You can follow other users, threads, posts, etc.

There's also an alternative way to find new content and keep up with what is going on other than clicking the 'What's new?' link. If you click on the "Members" tab, and then the "Everyone's news feed" link, you will find the global activity stream. Everything that all members of the board does is published to the news feed. It's fun to sit on that page and refresh from time to time to discover what people are doing and posting about.

 

[Phillip]

Facebook and Twitter Integration

You'll see that our new forum has tight integration with Facebook and Twitter. Any page can be easily posted on your Facebook or Twitter accounts immediately to share with others.

You can also now login to the Muppet Central Forum with your Facebook account if you so choose to do so.

Please note, the first time you use Facebook with Muppet Central you'll need to "allow" us to access your Facebook account. Your permission is needed in order to protect your privacy and your Facebook account.