I would like to thank you for bearing with me while doing this. Hopefully the forums should be noticably faster and more pleasant to use than they were before. This was the whole point of the rewrite in the first place. In the process I also added a few new features such as subforums and group based permissions, and the forum layout has been revamped.
Finally, I would like to point out a little known feature that we've had for a long time. This is how an unread thread looks when you are browsing a forum:
You are provided with 4 "entrance points" to the thread:
Clicking the thread title takes you to the first page in the thread
You can jump directly to a page by selecting one in the drop down menu
Clicking the red (or grey if the thread isn't unread) arrow to the right takes you to the bottom of the last page in the thread
And finally: Clicking the blue arrow next to the thread title (only visible for unread threads) takes you to the first unread post in the thread.
Nice to have the forums back. Posting in the news was nice and all, but it was starting to lag a little bit with all the embedded videos, for me at least.
It surprises me that the blue arrow is little-known, I've been using it since I joined.
Thanks Kieran, for caring about your users and site (unlike a lot of site owners). SMWC was always one of the best online communities out there, and this renovation will just make it even better. Thanks for the new forums! I can't wait to see what we'll get for Christmas...
Keep in mind that things may seem very .. disorienting at first. In the end though, the staff are going to do their best to get all of the threads moved around + stuff reorganized. A lot of new subforums were also introduced (including the Works in Progress and Full Releases subforums).
Wow, I almost forgot what this post box looks like. I like the new features too. But I thought that this renovation was just optimization (cool, I spelled it right on my first try) not any new features.
Super! The new forum features are a bit strange yet, but I'm sure they'll be good. The only thing I don't really like is the dropdown box, at some longer threads it takes a while to scroll down to the last page. And I don't know how many pages a thread has, from the first look (well except if I count the posts and divide by 20...). Other than these, it looks great, and I like the subforums idea!
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- Serious thing kinda happening.
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