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Summary of Changes

Forum-wide

  • Updated font hierarchy across the forum to standardize font size
    • Most visible impact: Post text size reduced by 1px
    • We will be adjusting this based on a few issues that have been raised on specific devices.
  • Social embeds are now available for 120+ social, entertainment, and news sites

Search

  • Search ranking and ordering improved to provide more relevant and recent results
  • Searching in “quotes,” using search booleans (this OR that), and using +/- to include/exclude now works
  • Searching for strings with “-” will no longer throw an error
  • Header search dropdown will now consistently appear on click

Alerts and Notices

  • Updated alert background colors and font-weight to distinguish between unread and read notifications

Nodes / Threads / Posts

  • Updated and unified post actions
    • All views now display the same post actions and order (reply, quote, like, save, share)
    • Actions are accessible to guests with a prompt for login
  • Updated thread and node layout to improve wrapping issues
  • Page counter will now display thousands and millions with a comma (1000 -> 1,000)
  • Relative timestamps will display up to “7D” ago (up from 1D).

Forum Administration

  • Account merge and post recalculation
    • Merging accounts will now correctly recalculate the post-count
    • Created a new tool to allow post recounting on demand in the admin panel when editing a user.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • The issue where warnings resulted in an error code being displayed has been resolved.
  • Styling changes were made to the News Feed tab to keep it consistent with other tabs, such as What’s New.
  • The issue where members saw an error message on the plan and payment page after reactivating the business has been resolved.
  • The showcase filter resetting after leaving the first page has been resolved. 
  • The issue of users not receiving alerts for followed threads has been resolved.
  • Images in listings now appear when viewing threads in Tapatalk.
  • The issue where guests were unable to sign up using the guest reply sign-up methods has been resolved. 
  • The issue where forum footers were misconfigured to include the join now prompt has been resolved. 
  • When viewing the homepage on mobile devices, the CSS issues related to a user’s avatar have been resolved.
  • The inability of members to save changes in their account preferences unless they scrolled to the bottom of the page on a mobile device has been resolved.
  • The additional border display issue around the reply box has been resolved.
  • A member’s reaction scores have been aligned on their avatar.
  • The issue where members would create listings or deals with attachments that did not display after being posted has been resolved.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes:

Profile Posts 

  • The issue where authors or users clicked on the alert for “new profile posts” and were redirected to the business or article tab instead of the new profile post has been resolved. 

Postbit Display

  • The issue where a user’s postbit was hidden behind the navigation bar has been resolved. 

Tapatalk

  • The issue where posts had extra spacing when browsing on Android devices was fixed.
  • The issue where threads with multiple images weren’t loading was resolved. 

Images

  • The issue where additional padding was seen when viewing images taken from a phone on a large monitor has been resolved

Marketplace

  • The issue where the wrong modal was displayed for Administrators and Moderators when clicking the “Mark as Sold” button on a listing was resolved. 

Vendor Subscriptions

  • The issue where a Business Logo was not being set during Business Registration was resolved.
  • The issue where a vendor could not add a keyword on a “Keyword Alerts” page using a Firefox browser was resolved.
  • Previously, if a business clicked on a page within profile posts they would be incorrectly redirected to the business tab of their profile. This issue has been resolved. 

Other

  • Resolved an issue where liking somebody else’s post resulted in an error.
  • Added a “News Feed” link to the “What’s New” page where users can see posts from followed members.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes:

Helpful Reaction

  • A new reaction called “Helpful” has been added to all sites. Members can use this reaction on posts they deem helpful. 

Notifications

  • The issue where members were not receiving push notifications even after their account preferences are set to receive notifications has been resolved. 

Marketplace

  • The issue where members were unable to enter a location when trying to create a Marketplace listing has been resolved.

Media Gallery

  • The issue where members were unable to post replies within the Media Gallery has been resolved. 

Moderate Images

  • The issue where admins/mods were unable to moderate images using the moderator tools has been resolved. 

Formatting

  • Minor formatting changes have been made to align the Apple and Facebook login buttons.
  • The issue where mobile preview of articles was off due to spacing inconsistencies has been resolved.
  • The issue where the forum logo image was not centered when viewing on mobile devices has been resolved. 

Spoilers

  • The issue where spoilers did not display correctly on certain sites has been resolved. 

Censor Word List

  • The issue where members were unable to modify the censor word list for Watchuseek has been resolved. 

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • The minor CSS problems in dark mode, on homepage, or "Recommended for you" on various sites resulting in issues like ads not being displayed correctly have been resolved.
  • The issue where pagination did not load the next page under the “Profile posts” tab in the “User Profile” has been resolved.
  • The style issue in the Dark Mode where the “Post Options” menu icon disappears after being clicked on has been resolved.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • Vendors will no longer receive Keyword Alerts for threads they cannot access.
  • Resolved the issue where members’ replies were being duplicated when posting.
  • Resolved the issue where members were unable to reply to specific posts by using the reply quote button.
  • Resolved the issue where Tapatalk app users could not view classifieds sections. 
  • Resolved the issue where Tapatalk app users encountered an error on the “Timeline” and “Unread” tabs.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes: 

  • Visual update
    • We have added content moderators to display in the Forum Staff section sidebar.
  • Marketplace
    • When a user marks a listing as completed, you can now indicate where you completed the transaction.
    • Advanced filters for price, currency, etc., are now available within Marketplace nodes.
  • Bug fixes
    • We have resolved the issue where a member was unable to delete an uploaded photo as part of a new post.
    • The bug where the member's avatar was being partially hidden by the top navigation bar has been resolved.
    • The inconsistent number of threads per page bug has been resolved.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes:

Marketplace

  • Preview options for Marketplace listings will now reflect what is being displayed when the listing is created.
  • We added a ‘started by’ filter on Marketplace Home to allow members to find listings by the same member.
  • Price field is now optional when creating a WTB listing.

Performance

  • Recommended Reading at the bottom of each thread is now lazy-loaded to help increase the loading speed for the thread content.

Showcase

  • The message that is displayed on a member's profile with no showcase (xa_sc_x_has_not_posted_any_items_yet) has been changed to show that the member has not yet created any items.

Section Moderators

  • The issue where the forum Section Moderator widget within sub-forums and categories incorrectly displayed random forum moderators instead of section moderators has been resolved.

Thank you for your continued support. Please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

Marketplace

  • New Features
    • Marketplace sellers can now leave reviews for all buyers when selling multiple items in a post. 
    • We have now included HKD as a new currency option where applicable.
    • Efforts have been made to make the price input field feel more intuitive when creating a listing or deal.
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fixed an issue where the location field would not load when editing a deal posting.
    • Fixed an issue to sort threads by latest activity by default.
    • Fixed an issue with required fields for Want to Buy listings.
    • Fixed an issue where the Mileage field did not display properly in listing preview.
    • Fixed an issue where listing price color was changing based on read/unread status.
    • Fixed an issue where “For Trade” form fields were displayed when selecting the “Want to Buy” form

Vendor Subscription Product

  • The business registration form has been updated to include options to show/hide a Business Email and a Business Phone number on the Business Profile page.
  • Vendor members will now receive a notification when a ban is issued to their account, and when the ban is lifted.
  • The Free Business section on the Business Directory page now has a link that takes users to the FAQ to explain why Free Businesses are not listed here.
  • Vendor members who are reported or require manual approval will have their Business plan listed in the report or approval queue.

Cali Core

  • The issue where the reply button appeared on closed threads has been resolved. You will no longer see this button on threads where participation has been closed.

Edit Posts 

  • The issue where moderators and admins were unable to edit posts with a Pinterest link has been resolved.

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • Marketplace
    • We are aware of an issue that occurs when filtering threads in the Marketplace. Currently threads are only able to be sorted by date created, not by most recent comment. We will be rolling out a fix for this with the next release.
    • Marketplace prefixes are now clickable and filters on selection.
      • Prefixes are labels/tags that denote if a listing is Want to Sell, Want to Buy, or For Trade. 
    • You will now receive a notification alert when someone leaves a review on your Marketplace listing.
    • Admins can now set default settings for the post types in Marketplace listing in the admin panel under the node’s setting.
    • When closing Marketplace threads, you will now see a list of suggested members to allow you to leave a review. 
  • Only Show This User 
    • The issue where a guest was unable to see the Only Show this User option on posts has been resolved. Guests will now be able to filter posts by users. 
  • Discussions
    • Previously, sorting a user's discussions by relevancy or recency would result in a different number of results showing up. This issue has been resolved.
  • Vendor Subscription Product
    • Vendors on Supporting and Premium plans will see an updated notification when a ban is issued.  The notification will include links to help them contact customer support.
    • Business users will now see a character count when adding information into the "About Business" field when registering a business and updating the business settings.
    • The issue where forum Administrators/Moderators were unable to issue a warning to the vendors on a Premium Vendor plan with a Vendor Forum created has been fixed.
    • The "Business" tab on the User Profile page is now hidden from guests and registered members until certain posting criteria is met, or if the plan is upgraded to Supporting or Premium Vendor. Forum administrators and moderators are still able to see the business details and can archive the business if needed.
    • Business users with no phrases set up in Keyword Alerts will now have their Business Name set up as the first keyword by default.

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • Marketplace
    • Users can now leave a rating from a listing itself (Want to Sell/Buy) as opposed to navigating to a user profile with a listing URL.
    • When creating a listing, Marketplace Forum Nodes will now be alphabetical. 
    • When users' accounts are merged, Marketplace Ratings will carry over to the new target user as well.
    • Tapatalk users will now see a price in the listing title whenever available. 
    • Want to Trade is now available as a listing option. Users can also leave a review on trade transactions.
    • Currency has been split from the original price to show it applies to both original and deal prices.
  • Featured Threads
    • A bug around manually selecting a featured thread by an Admin would cause a site crash has been resolved. 
  • Search
    • The issue where clicking the “search keyword” in the search bar did not perform a search query has been resolved. Now when a user clicks the “search keyword,” a search will be performed across the entire site. 
  • Article
    • Articles will now display a list of all attachments in the post at the bottom of the post if available. 
  • Vendor Subscription Product
    • A phone number is now required for business registration.

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • Search UI Improvement Global Rollout
    • As part of user feedback, we’ve heard users complain about how difficult it can be to use the Search functionality. To address these concerns, we’ve made changes to improve user experience.
    • Merging advanced search tabs with the search results page so users can sort results by categories without having to leave the page
    • Integrating advanced search filters directly into the search results page
  • Marketplace
    • Users can now edit and delete a review they left for another user. 
      • Users can edit/delete a review within a specified time. 
        • The timeframe allowed to edit is displayed beside the option. (30 days by default)
  • Homepage
    • Resolved the issue where the Recommended Reading feed is missing after backing to homepage 
    • Resolved the issue where the page content would shift up or stutter while loading.
  • Thread Listing
    • Fixed an alignment issue on some android devices
  • Misc. performance improvement. 

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team


Summary of Changes

  • Homepage
    • Previously, a thread would only display a thumbnail if there was an uploaded image. Now if a thread does not have an uploaded image but does have a linked image, that linked image will display as the thread thumbnail on the homepage. 
    • The issue where the homepage logo appeared smaller on Safari compared to other browsers has been resolved. 
    • We have been made aware of an issue where user experience on the Homepage may be interrupted from the expected behavior. This is being worked on.
  • Images
    • The issue when hovering over an image would display a duplicated automatically generated description of the image, for tools such as accessibility assistance, has been resolved.
  • Forum View
    • The issue where the date on a forum would break and display in 2 lines on a mobile device has been resolved.
  • Vendor Subscription Product 
    • The issue where businesses located outside of Canada or USA were unable to register their business has been resolved. 
  • Marketplace
    • The issue where the “For Trade” prefix color was not appearing correctly has been resolved. 
      • For Trade listing type coming to all communities shortly.
    • We fixed an error message that displayed when users attempted to upload an image that exceeded the allowed limit (20MB). This also fixes a similar issue raised when a listing would not post due to the image size being too large.
  • Search
    • Previously, if an album was moved into a different category, it could not be found through search in this category. This issue has now been resolved. 
  • Terms of Use 
    • We have updated our Term of Use to include “Supplemental Terms” where appropriate for the site. Please take time to review these additional terms. 
  • Dark Mode
    • Minor enhancements have been made to thread details (ex: thread creator, posted date, etc.) so they stand out more in dark mode. 
  • Extended Maintenance Cycle
    • We would like to take a moment to address recent service times after some user feedback. We are continuing to work on improving our systems for everyone on the forum. This will occasionally result in extended down times for some members. We hope these interruptions will be minor and pass quickly; however in the instance where service may be significantly interrupted we will aim to provide advanced warning. 

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • Password Policy
    • A password policy has been implemented to enforce stronger security measures. New passwords will be required to have a minimum length of 8 characters.
  • Mobile - Forum Navigation 
    • When viewing threads on a mobile device, users will now be able to view the breadcrumb navigation at the bottom of the page in addition to the top of the page. This will allow users easier navigation to go back to the parent forum. 
  • Prefix
    • Users will now be able to access a variety of colored prefixes for threads and articles in dark mode.
  • Marketplace
    • Edit for image gallery within deals thread types is now functional.
    • Location field for listings is now optional to ensure that it is only provided when users feel comfortable doing so. 
    • Users will now be able to filter by For Sale and Want to Buy in the Marketplace.
  • Post Timestamps
    • After 24 hours, timestamps on posts will convert from relative time (ex: 1 day ago) to the date of post (ex: February 15, 2022). Hovering over the date will show the date and time of the post.
  • Homepage
    • Previously, users who had the Homepage opened on one tab and a forum opened on another tab to create a thread would see duplicate threads on the Homepage when they clicked the load more button. This issue has been resolved. 
    • The formatting issue where long forum names would wrap to a second line has been resolved.
  • User Replies
    • The issue where the posted date in forum view would not display exact times but would act as a link instead, has been resolved.
  •  User Profile
    • Moderators and Admins will now be able to hover over User Profile information in the Approval Queue to help them better investigate newly registered members. 

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • Vendor Self-Serve
    • [New Feature] Business Team Management for Vendor Subscription Product
      • Businesses on a Premium Vendor plan can now add up to two additional team members to their business profile.
    • [New Feature] Keyword Alerts for Vendor Subscription Product
      • The Keyword Alerts feature allows Business users on Supporting and Premium Vendor plans to receive notifications based on a custom list of words and phrases they can create and manage.
    • The issue where the Business Directory contained the businesses of users with only deleted posts has been resolved. 
  • Marketplace
    • The issue where the “Message Buyer” button was not working on the Want to Buy listings has been resolved.
    • Some modifications have been made to expiry date behavior on deals to ensure users are only seeing active deals. This includes:
      • If a user has not specified an expiry date, a default expiry date of 60 days after deal creation will be applied. Users will be able to edit this expiry date.
      • When creating or editing a deal, users cannot set an expiry date more than 120 days into the future. 
    • Changes have been made to how many ratings buyers and sellers can leave on a listing. This includes:
      • Buyers will now only be able to leave 1 review for each unique listing by a seller.
      • Sellers will only be able to leave 1 review for each buyer of a listing.
      • Users may only leave a review within 3 months of the listing creation regardless of that listing’s status
      • If a user’s review of a listing was deleted, they will be able to leave another rating
    • An issue where special characters caused an error in marketplace searches has been fixed. 
    • The image upload button has been relocated to make it more visually clear on the listing creation form. 
    • When users mark a “want to sell” listing as sold, a list of recommended users will be provided to leave a review. This is based on recent activity of conversations and replies in the listing thread. 
    • Users can now filter within the marketplace landing page for location based on a radius on top of other filters. 
  • What’s New
    • Private forums, or forums not displayed to the general public will no longer display in the What’s New Section.  
  • Images
    • The extra spacing and padding issues that occurred when a linked image was added to a post has been resolved.
  • Album
    • Previously, if an album name was changed, a search for albums would still show you the album under the old name. This issue has been fixed.

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Summary of Changes 

  • Show Only This User Feature 
    • We have released a new option to Only Show this User per thread. In a thread you can now filter any thread to only display responses by a single member.
  • Google One Tap
    • Previously users who would ignore the One Tap pop-up would still continue to see the pop-up. This has now been resolved. 
    • You can now disassociate the Google account that is linked to your One Tap account registration through their “Connected Accounts” page.
  • Signature
    • Space reserve issues within signatures such as images being cut-off or text being cut-off have been resolved. 
  • Mobile Sub-forum View 
    • Users will now be able to see an indicator which shows how many descendent sub-forums are within a parent forum from the forum directory. 
  • Search
    • When a user completes a search based on a keyword, the search results page has been updated to reflect that keyword. 
  • Moderator Tools
    • We expanded the moderator tools with a chart of useful guidelines in helping them make more challenging decisions. 
    • Along with this we have standardized Warning Actions based off of the actions on the chart. 
    • Custom Warning options have been carried over and respected, and can still be created or edited.  

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes 

  • Quick Thread
    • Users will now be able to create discussions and articles without leaving the forum they were in by creating a quick thread! 
    • Users will see a “Create Post” input field at the top of the forum which, when clicked, will expand and give users the ability to create a post like normal. 
    • Quick threads are not available in Marketplace or Designated Deals Nodes. 

  • Homepage 
    • The issue when reading a thread off of the home page not reflecting the “read” status has been resolved.
  • Search - Context UI Update 
    • Visual improvements have been made to the search functionality in the forum to simplify it. These changes were made based on user feedback. 
  • Layout Improvements 
    • Visual improvements have been made to spoilers, snippets and attachments in dark mode. They will now be more visible with a different colored background behind them (similar to how they appear in light mode). 
  • Custom User Field
    • The issue when users were unable to save changes to custom user fields has been resolved.  Users will now be able to edit and successfully save changes as part of their profile. 
  • Signature 
    • The issue where images in a signature appeared to be cut off when viewing posts on a mobile device has been fixed. 
  • Article
    • The issue where the first reply to an article caused formatting discrepancies has been resolved. 
  • Maintenance Page 
    • The wording on the maintenance page has been updated to provide more information about the location of Release Notes under the Help section. 
  • Marketplace 
    • We are working on rolling-out a Marketplace feature that is regularly receiving updates based on your feedback. 
    • This is a tool-set that will enhance our current Classifieds sections. We are working to add features, such as a feedback / rating system which should increase buyer / seller confidence and safety.
    • Classifieds sections will have a new Marketplace thread type to create Buy/Sell listings. This listing will have special custom fields to help provide more information, and to aid in searching through the listings.

  • There will be a Marketplace homepage shortcut in the navigation drop-down that will populate once new listings are created using the Buy/Sell Marketplace post type.

This will be our last release of 2021, and we want to thank you all for the patience and feedback that has been provided to help fuel our decisions. The team is still actively working on trying to get as many bug fixes and new features out there as possible, and we hope to provide many more exciting things for 2022.

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes 

  • Homepage - Ignore User
    • If you ignored another user, then any content created by the ignored user will not appear on your homepage anymore. 
  • Media Advanced Search Result Page Layout Improvements 
    • Visual layout improvements have been made to the Media Advanced Search results. This is part of an ongoing effort to improve user experience with search result pages.
  • Business Directory
    •  We are happy to introduce a new feature for prospective businesses in our Business Directory.  This is a self-serve product that allows Vendors to sign-up as a business on the forum where they are able to purchase a vendor subscription.
    • Note: Vendors on Supporting or Premium Vendor plans can only start threads to advertise their products in the Vendor Deals or Business Forums located in the Vendor Member Section. However, these Vendors can offer their products or services to the community members by replying to the conversations if their reply is contributing to the conversation and is relevant.
    • Recently we have begun to release additional features on this, such as a new Business Dashboard to help Vendors view and understand the performance of their Vendor Subscription efforts. The new dashboard features performance stats specific to Vendors' engagement and exposure on the site.
    • We also will be tooling the Free Businesses  page in the coming week to ensure only recent, active, and relevant businesses are listed here.
  • View a Particular User's Replies in a Thread 
    • Users will now be able to filter and only see a selected user’s replies by using the new Only Show This User feature on the 3 vertical dots to the far right of the time stamp on a menu. This feature will be incredibly useful when looking for a specific user’s comments in mega threads.

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes 

  • Images
    • The increase in empty space around inserted images has been corrected. We have also worked to fix the formatting issues such as images breaking into two lines and the inability to center an image. 
    • A shimmer solution has been implemented when images are loading in a thread. We are continuing to work on the image loading issue, and will provide more information as we resolve things. 
  • Conversation 
    • The issue where users had an indicator notifying them of unread conversations despite checking all locations and marking all conversations read has been resolved. If you notice this still happening please reach out to us in the community support section.
  • Accessibility  Improvements
    • Follow Tag
      • Visual improvements have been made to the Follow Tag so it is more noticeable on threads.
        • This is based on the feedback we received from our user survey.
    • Dark Mode
      • Visual improvements have been made to links in Alerts so they are more noticeable. 
  • Help Page 
    • Moderators will now see Mod FAQ in the Help section. 
  • Forum Icons
    • The issue where icons were missing or not aligned for link type and page type forum has been resolved. 

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes 

  • Icon and Number Alignment 
    • When viewing a forum in the main forum listing, we corrected a misalignment issue that would happen if the view count was in the triple digits. 
  • Unread Threads 
    • When marking threads as read from the What’s New section, all threads across the site would be marked as read. This issue has been resolved and the Mark All as Read function should now only mark threads loaded on that page. 
    • New font color is being used to help logged-in users better distinguish between read and unread threads in Dark Mode. 
      • This change is based on the feedback we received from our user survey.
  • Images & Gallery   
    • The issue where image uploads failed if the extension (ex: jpeg, png) was capitalized has been resolved.
    • The issue where a user’s media upload does not appear in their profile’s media or gallery has been resolved. 
  • Embedded YouTube Videos
    • The embedded YouTube player within threads has been enlarged to provide a better viewing experience for users. 
  • Homepage 
    • When viewing a thread on the Homepage, the thread would sometimes not load the option to “follow” the thread. This has now been resolved. 
  • Custom User Fields 
    • Custom user fields such as vehicle details and social media links have been restored so users can add and edit these fields and view them on their profile. 
  • Mod Warning System Update
    • Mods have their FAQs and tools expanded. This includes the ability to set Warning Point Actions based on the amount of Warning Points a member accrues. 
    • Warning Point Actions include Temporary of permanent bans, as well as other helpful suggestions in addition to the existing tools at their disposal.
  • Google One Tap 
    • One Tap will no longer bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) for users who have it enabled on their accounts.
    • The issue where users receive an ambiguous error message when registering an already existing username has been resolved. Users will now be clearly notified that the username has been taken. 
    • Users with an email address that’s 25 characters or longer will be able to successfully register with the first 20 characters of their email address auto-populating as a potential username. 

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

  • Multi-Image Upload
    • Improved Users ability to upload multiple images at once as attachments instead of having to upload each image one by one. Further to image improvements, we are testing uploading methods. As of now please work to upload files with standard all lowercase formatting (E.G. .jpg instead of .JPG or .png instead of .PNG)
  • Admin Panel 
    • Volunteers using the administrator’s panel will notice that the issue where the Node Description field was missing when creating or editing nodes has been resolved. 
  • Necro Post Warning 
    • Users will see a warning when replying to threads that have not received new responses in at least 6 months.

  • Image Viewing
    • Space is reserved for images before thread content is fully loaded to prevent content shifting. This will improve the overall reading experience. 

Google One Tap Review 

  • Since the global release of Google One Tap Oct 13, 2021 we’ve seen great results with a significant increase in new users and engagement! We’ll continue to monitor results. 

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

 

  • OneTap 
    • We have rolled out new integration with Google OneTap, a sign in option which will help make it easier for new users to join the site. You can still register as normal, and all existing users can sign in as they always have.
  • Home Page
    • The issue where a user loses their scroll position on the home page after viewing a thread and returning back to the home page 
      • This is based on the feedback we received from our NPS survey.
    • Users can now hover on the thread starting date and last activity date (e.g. 3 months ago) to see the actual time (e.g. June 2, 2021 at 2:42 PM). 
    • The problem where "Mark All Read" was causing issues with the read/unread status of threads on the homepage has been fixed.
  • Usability Improvements
    • Desktop
      • Users can now hover on any abbreviated number with thread views or other instances(e.g. 12,3K, 1.42M) and see the unabbreviated number. (e.g. 123456)
    • Mobile
      • Mobile users can now hold down on the abbreviated number(e.g. 12,3K, 1.42M)  to see the unabbreviated number. 
      • Mobile users can now hold down on the relative time(e.g. 3 month ago) to see the actual time.(e.g. June 2, 2021 at 2:42 PM).
    • This is based on the feedback we received from our NPS survey.
  • Conversation
    • Improved the design for the mobile view of conversations.
  • Business Directory: 
    • We are excited to announce an upcoming new tool that will help our communities further grow, while enhancing the onboarding process for new vendors and site sponsors. The Vendor Self-Serve is a tool that will help prospective sponsors become official vendors in the community, by streamlining the process and putting the setup (from start to finish) in the hands of our business partners.  The program will help set up an option for all tiers of service, including a free option. 
    • Note: Vendors on Supporting or Premium Vendor plans can only start threads to advertise their products in the Vendor Deals or Business Forums located in the Vendor Member Section. However, these Vendors can offer their products or services to the community members by replying to the conversations if their reply is contributing to the conversation and is relevant.
    • The Vendor Self Serve tool can be found in the footer of the website as “Business” or in your Account Details page as “Register as a Business”

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Changes and Bug fixes

  • Two Factor Authentication Log in
    • You should no longer redirect to the home page when logging in, you are not redirected back to where they came from.
  • Performance
    • Improved the loading speed of the Gallery listing page.
    • Extended the pre-lazy load range to pre-load more images before they are scrolled up into the screen, improving the reading experience.
  • New Username Self Serve Options
    • We have provided an option to the hard working mods and admins on the site where new users who have registered in the past 90 days will be able to change their username once to adjust for any errors in creation.
    • This is an option to assist the mods, and may not be available if the team here opts out of it
  • Contact Us
    • Added a new “Ban Appeal” category for contact reasons. 

Upcoming features being Developed

  • Google One Tap
    • We will start testing the new Google OneTap feature which should improve user login and sign-up experience.
    • If you have an account, you will be able to log in with 1 tap.
    • If you don't, you will be able to easily create one from Google.
  • Marketplace 
    • We are starting to test a Marketplace feature set that we are currently working on.
    • This will be a tool-set that will enhance our current Classifieds sections and increase buyer / seller confidence and safety.
    • We are currently working on the following features
  • Listing on Forum listing with Listing Tags
    • Preview only (not finalized)
  • Multi-Image Upload / Image Gallery
  • Marking a listing as Sold
    • Changing the prefixes from Selling to Sold etc.
  • Dedicated Marketplace Nodes
  • iTrader Rating Integration Discovery
  • Buyer/Seller Rating & Reputation
    • We thank you for your patience as we work to improve the classifieds section, and hope we can provide more updates as we get closer to launching the feature

Thank you for your continued support, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

New Feature: Image Search (Showcase/Gallery)
Users should be able to search for images within the Gallery and Showcase from the “Advanced Search” menu. The following options are now present:

  • Search Showcase
  • Search Albums
  • Search Media
  • Search Media Comments

When the User searches within these advanced search options they will be taken to a results page:

While this project is still not completed we did want to share and release the work we have done so far. Further attention will focus on design/styling changes and retention or reset of parameters of search results. 

New Mod Guidelines Page
The FAQ section has been updated to include a help page for Moderators and Admins. 

Reactions in Showcase
Reactions are now fully integrated into the showcase section.

The What’s New Page
There is now a separate tab for News & Articles. These will primarily help show off new Articles published in the community and help navigate to that content with ease.

Search Results: View Count 
If a thread or page had more than 4 symbols in the count, the thread was displaced. We have since corrected this to ensure it all remains in the same line.

Before Fix

After Fix

Thank you for your continued support and feedback, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

What We’ve Been Up To?

Accessibility
We are making continuous improvements to our forums so more people can access them in an easy-to-use manner. Recent updates focus on adding better compatibility with screen readers and descriptive text.

Reactions
You are now able to react to posts, threads, articles, comments and images with Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry:

​

Content Tag Search Update
Users now have the ability to search for multiple tags by going to: Advanced Search, Tag Search, and typing in the tags they want to search for. 

Unfurling Update
Unfurl links for Amazon, Best Buy, and eBay to make it easier for our users to understand the links that they will potentially interact with. Below is an example of an Amazon.ca link:

Media permissions
Registered users will now be able to delete their own gallery media items.  

Inactive checkboxes
Have been removed from the “My Discussions” & “Participated Discussions” areas.

What Are We Planning To Do?

Accessibility
We are continuing to make accessibility a priority so all of our users have an awesome experience. Including improving color contrast and making links more prominent with an underline in notices and alerts. We also are working to make links readable by the screen reading software.

Vendor Subscriptions
​

We are working on helping communities automate the sign-up of vendors:

  • Vendors will sign up online in a similar way to our premium membership program.
  • Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • Vendor Subscriptions introduces a new "free" business user account. This account does not provide any posting privileges. Instead it helps us identify business users in our forums. 
  • Vendors will gain access to posting activity and engagement metrics in a new dashboard.

Recommended Reading
We have heard your feedback and will be working on releasing a hard filter on older content to stop any “zombie threads” or outdated content from appearing in the recommended reading section. Our new filter will be initially set to 7 months to ensure we only bring you the most relevant and freshest content available!

Thank you for your continued support and feedback, please let us know if we could further improve your experience on the forum.

Your Community Support Team

Content Tags
We are excited to announce that the tagging system is now being released to all sites. This is a feature that we have been actively working on and now you will be able to add tags to showcase items, gallery images, articles, and threads that you create. This will help organize content and make it easier for the community to find. These tags become links, allowing topics that discuss similar things to be grouped and searched.

As a user, you can add tags to the following areas on creation:

  • Articles
  • Threads/Discussions
  • Gallery
  • Showcase

If you did not add a tag when creating an article, thread, discussion, gallery or showcase you can navigate to your post and select the “tag icon”. This will open up a window where you can add a tag to your existing content. Please note: The tag has a character limit of 3 to 25 characters. 

Tags are also now searchable via the “Advanced Search” option using the “Search Tags” tab. There are two ways to search tags on this page and both options will generate results with tags applied to Articles, Threads/Discussions, Gallery and Showcase.

  • Custom Search: When the page loads you will be able to enter text and search for tags on the site.
  • Popular Tags: When the page loads you will see a sub-section called “Popular Tags” this feature provides suggestions for commonly used tags to click and discover within your favourite community.

Administrators will have access to the tag manager in the admin control panel and will be able to view all content associated with a particular tag, merge, add, and delete tags. New tags will respect our censored words list. 

Sorting by Most recent/Most Relevant after completing a search by Username
When a User used the “Advanced Search '' page, and conducted a search by username, and attempted to sort by “Most Relevant/Most Recent” it would redirect the User back to the “Advanced Search” page.  

This issue has been resolved with this release. The User can now sort the results page by “Most Relevant/Most Recent” without being redirected to the “Advanced Search” page. 

Dark mode Improvements
We have updated the colour scheme for the pop-up background in dark mode. This change makes the pop-up visually different and separates it from the background.

Coming Soon

Reactions:
We are continuing to work on a new “Reactions'' feature that will allow members to better express their response to a post. As of recently we have further updated some of the designs and as of now we can tease the following sneak peek:

This is still being polished and we will provide further information as this is released in the future.

If you have any feedback or questions we are happy to help as always!

Thanks,

Your Community Management Team

While we have been working on minor fixes in our weekly updates, we had figured it would be worthwhile to update you on some minor changes we have been rolling out.

  • Pinterest posting edit fix:
    •  There was an issue for users that replied to a thread that included a pinterest link, if the user later tried to edit their post, the changes could not be saved. This issue has been resolved, and will be in production after the May 25th release.
  • Sorting by Most recent/Most Relevant after completing a search by Username.
    • When a User navigated to the “Advanced Search '' page, conducted a search by username, and attempted to sort by “Most Relevant/Most Recent” it would redirect the User back to the “Advanced Search” page.  
    • This issue has been resolved with this release. The User can now sort the results page by “Most Relevant/Most Recent” without being redirected to the “Advanced Search” page. 
  • Dark mode Improvements
    • We have updated the colour scheme for the pop-up background in dark mode. This change makes the pop-up visually different and separates it from the background.

Thank you for your feedback,

Your Community Support Team

What we’ve been up to?

Featured Threads

Featured Threads sits at the top of the homepage and showcases 5 articles or threads in a beautiful, eye-catching module. The feature displays across all screen sizes, gracefully adding or removing a tile to help the content fit naturally into the viewing area. This way we can surface content that is most interesting or helpful. Since then we've been testing “Featured Threads” across a selection of pioneering sites.

On site Administrators can manually select some or all of the threads for their site. Our algorithm will automatically select valid threads where manual threads are not provided. Manually-selected threads will expire after 28 days at which point the system will attempt to populate new threads automatically. Automatically-selected threads will refresh on a daily basis.

What threads can I showcase with Featured Threads?

A valid Featured Thread is a thread or article that:

  1. Has an image in its first post
  2. Whose image is “Safe for Work” according to Google
  3. Threads are public and visible to non-logged in members

When will it be available in my community?

Hundreds of communities already have Featured Threads enabled. If you don’t see it on your homepage yet, you can expect it to be there soon.

BB Code Helper

The BBCode "Help Section" has been added to the FAQ page. This will assist users with troubleshooting some commonly asked questions, and offer assistance for new BB Code users with tips like how to make wrapped text bold, or changing the color or font. 

What we’re planning to do

Image Search Update & Re-design Preview

Good news, we are continuing our improvements to the image search experience! We have been testing image search, with the feedback we’ve gathered we are working towards a redesign of a few site functions.

Showcase, Albums, and Media Search Results Redesign

We are moving to a beautiful tiled view for the Showcase, Albums and Media search results pages. This view will include the image, image/album title, timestamp and username.

Discussions & Media Comments Redesign

We are making our search results pages for discussions and media comments more consistent. Changes include reducing white space, providing more focus on core content, and updating to a clean visual experience.

Content Tags [New Feature]

To help organize content and make it easier for the community to find, you will soon be able to add tags to your content. These tags become links, allowing topics that discuss similar things to be grouped and searched. These tags can be managed by the volunteers on the site.

Where do you add tags?

As a user, you can add tags to the following areas:

  • Articles
  • Threads/Discussions 
  • Gallery
  • Showcase

Will I be able to edit my post’s Tags?

Yes, if you have posted your content and wish to add or edit an existing tag, navigate to the posted content and click the “tag icon”. This will allow you to edit. 

Will I be able to search Tags?

Yes, you can search tags by navigating to our “Advanced Search” and selecting the “Search Tags” tab. There are two ways to search tags on this page. 

  1. Custom Search: When the page loads you will be able to enter text and search for tags on the site.
  2. Popular Tags: When the page loads you will see a sub-section called “Popular Tags” this feature provides suggestions for commonly used tags to click and discover within your favourite community.

Both options will generate results with tags applied to Articles, Threads/Discussions, Gallery and Showcase. 

Thank you for your feedback,

Your Community Support Team

Summary of Changes

  • The orange loading indicator keeps loading
    • Users would sometimes see the orange loading indicator at the top of their screen. The indicator will not stop unless the user refreshes the screen. This error has been resolved.
  • Stop Forum Spam Improvements
    • As part of our ongoing efforts to fight spam we have increased the tools utilized on the site to help prevent instances of spam.
    • Implemented private Conversation scam prevention rules and adjustments.

Thank you for your feedback.

Your Community Support Team

Here’s a snapshot of how we have improved our platform within the final weeks of 2020 and our initial plans for 2021!

Rounding off 2020

Retiring of Comfort View

  • “Card View” has been in public for almost two months, and we are ready to move it out of beta! As of January 6th, we will be removing the “Comfort View” option from the site to reflect this change; all users will now be defaulted to “Card View.”
  • Less than 0.5% of our traffic is leveraging the "Comfort View" option. This should also help expedite our rollouts as we will not have to support two formats. Both Light and Dark modes will still be available on "Card View".

Notable Mentions

  • Threads Started By A User: A member can now better differentiate between threads started and by a member versus the threads that a member has participated in.
  • Retain Advanced Search Parameters: Advanced search parameters have now been expanded and improved.  
  • Vendor Rules: We want to make it easier for vendors to identify and navigate through the Vendor Setup/Rules.  We added these rules in the Help menu located in the FAQ section of the site.
  • Update Conversation Participant Limit For Mods/Admin: In an effort to improve communication for site Moderators and Administrators, we increased the conversation participant limit for these members.
  • Globally increase maximum character limits for posts from 50,000 to 100,000 for users.

Fixes

  • Welcome Popup for newly registered users
    • When a new user registers, a popup will appear that is designed to guide the user while navigating through the site for the first time. The content of this popup was not visible when the popup appeared. Release 84 will resolve this issue.
  • Mark All Read button in “What’s New” section error on resubmission
    • Issue: When a user navigates to the “What’s New” section of the site and hits the “mark all read” button an error message appears.

Looking to 2021

Upcoming Features and Changes

  • Homepage 2.0: We have embarked on a new journey. We are currently looking at new and exciting ways to curate and display site content on the homepage. The goal is to help surface items that the community has found interesting or insightful! We are looking at ways that are unique yet feel native to the sites. This is still very early but stay tuned for updates.
  • Homepage algorithm will continue to be improved. 
    • User’s own replies will no longer affect thread ranking on their personalized feed, solving the issue where if they reply a few threads, all those threads will surface onto top of their feed.
    • We are looking into solving the duplicated thread situation when the home page lazy loads.
  • Tagging: We will start looking into feasibility of the tag system, potentially providing more ways to organize the site content. 
  • Ability To Search For Images Within Gallery/Showcase: We are working towards introducing a search option in the Gallery/Showcase for images. Users should be able to search images by name/tags within these sections.

Thank you for your feedback,

Your Community Support Team

Card View Launch

It’s live! Our new view mode (Card View) has now rolled out in Beta form! The new look currently only covers the main pages of the site, including:

  • Homepage
  • Full Forum Listing
  • Sub-forum
  • Thread and Article
  • What's New page
  • Search Results

This feature is still in Beta. This means many of the features can grow and change based on your feedback to us. 

How To Remove Card View Announcement
Click on OK to permanently close the announcement (the X temporarily dismisses the notice).

How To Change View Mode
You can always toggle between Card View and Comfort View as you like. Click the 3 vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner of the site. Select View Mode

Choose the Forum View you prefer and click OK.

You can see more in the video tutorial below: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcN7BTT3ISI&feature=youtu.be

Last 30 Days

Card View Launch
It’s live! Our new view mode (card view) is beginning to roll out on multiple sites and should be live globally by the end of November!  This new view alleviates many of the whitespace issues that were previously experienced in the older “Comfort View.”

Recommender Update
We are focused on improving the Recommended Reading section by boosting the relevance and recency of the threads suggested.  We have improved the time factor to ensure that members do not  see older threads.  In this initial testing phase, we are rolling this change out to a few sites and will then plan to follow up with a global release next month.

Notable Mentions

  • Articles & BBCode features have been enabled for all sites. If you want to find out how to become an Author please let us know.

Fixes

  • Mods and Admins will now have the option to hide expiring redirects that leave a deleted thread link so that they can have a clear view of the thread list.  They will be able to filter out the deleted/redirected threads if they choose to do so.
    • We have added a filter that will allow Mods and Admins to Show/Hide expired redirects, and deleted threads. The filter is currently titled “Redirects” and this hides redirected and deleted threads. We will work to update the filter title in a future iteration to include the word deleted.  The new title will be “Deleted/Redirected”

  • Recaptcha: Error Message on Private Conversation. Users were receiving a Captcha error message when trying to send a Private Message. Users should no longer receive this message in error.

Next 30 Days

Card View
We will continue to make minor fixes to the UI associated with card view based on user feedback.

Recommender
We will continue to make minor fixes to the Recommender based on user feedback and internal data monitoring based on user surveys.

Upcoming Fixes

  • Duplicate Threads: We have seen an increase of duplicate threads appear on the homepage. We are working to rectify this.
  • Threads Started By a User: This fix will allow users to differentiate between threads started and by a member, versus the threads that a member has replied in.

Notable Mentions

  • Vendor Rules: We want to make it easy for vendors to identify and navigate through the Vendor Setup/Rules.  We will be adding these rules in the Help menu located in the FAQ section of the site.
  • Ability To Search For Images Within Gallery/Showcase: We are working towards introducing a search option in the Gallery/Showcase for images by name/tags within these sections.
  • Conversation Limit Increase for Mod and Admins Mods and Admins will be able to start a private conversation with up to 20 members.

Thank you for your feedback.

Your Community Support Team

Here’s a snapshot of how we have improved our platform within the last 30 days, and what is coming up in the next 30 days!

Last 30 Days

Top Navigation Update
We want our users to have a convenient way to locate other members of the community. We added a Members link shortcut to the Kabob Menu. Here you can search for members, see the Top Contributors, contact community Admins among many other notable stats on our members. Check it out!

NEXT 30 Days

Card View - Brand New Look
In September we made great progress on a new view option called “Card View”, this will result in a better overall reading experience for the user as well as the cleaning up of general UI elements. Based on user feedback we have allowed for a clearer separation and distinctions between posts. As of now we are hoping for a late October beta launch and a full roll-out of phase one in early Fall-Winter months.

When this feature goes live you will be able to toggle between Card view and Comfort view as you like. Below is a preview for how you can do this: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcN7BTT3ISI&feature=youtu.be 

ML Recommender Update
We are looking at continuing to make improvements to the recommended reading section by prioritizing recency for recommendations on all sites, and continuing our research and identifying problematic posts. Below is a preview of what is being worked on:

  • Better prioritizing a time factor to our recommendations, focusing on restricting the frequency in which older content shows up.
  • Working to keep recommendations relevant and within similar subforums.
  • We are working on identifying unhelpful and unwanted posts from being shared.

All of these updates and changes have been based on your feedback and we want to thank you for this. Please continue to let us know if there is more you would like to develop as we work to address concerns raised by members like you. 

Thank you for your feedback.

Your Community Support Team

Here’s a snapshot of how we have improved our platform within the last 30 days, and what is coming up in the next 30 days!

Last 30 Days

ML Recommender launched globally
We launched Machine Learning recommendations and have rolled out the Machine Learning Recommender to all sites. After this implementation, we have seen a significant increase in engagement on the improved results. We are looking at continuing to make improvements to this feature in September, such as respecting the start date of the post as recommended by the community.

Homepage 2.0 
We launched Homepage 2.0 globally in August. Our new homepage boasts a personal customized feed which is easier and faster to navigate. We are looking to continue with these improvements moving forward based on your recommendations.

UI/UX Improvements:
Adjustments to the alignment and formatting have been rolled out based on your feedback.

Next 30 Days

Updating Recommended Communities
We’ve renamed the Popular Communities to Recommended Communities, and are continuing to make improvements on how these are automatically selected. These will include “New” and growing communities that we think will be of interest to you.

Reaction System Project Introduction
Currently, in our platform we have a very basic pointing and trophy system. We are looking at expanding our pointing system across the board with different levels within our communities. By doing this we hope that we will incentivize users to complete actions and distinguish themselves within the community. 

We are currently in the discovery phase, and excited to share more with you soon!

Card View - Brand New Look
As part of our effort to respond to the feedback from the community regarding the "white space" issue on our sites, we are currently working on a brand new look for our sites, a new "Card View" aiming at

  • Fixing the white spacing issue
  • bringing more focus on the core content of the page
  • providing a better visual experience

Have no fear today’s current view will still be available as a Classic View option if you prefer it. We are looking at a Fall-Winter Launch. 

Thank you for your continued support and feedback. We hope to continue to update you on these changes as we roll them out and any challenges we encounter in the next month with our releases.

Your Community Support Team

Here’s a snapshot of how we have improved our platform within the last 30 days, and what is coming up in the next 30 days!

Last 30: Summary of Changes (July)

Homepage - Algorithm Update
We are continuing to improve our algorithm to bring you a more personalized experience that will highlight content that is relevant to you. We are slowly rolling out this to some sites, so if you have not seen this updated yet, it will be updating shortly for you.

  • Threads that you are following will now surface higher on your homepage feed when there are new replies.
  • Threads posted by the user that you are following will have a boost in ranking in your feed.
  • Threads posted under the sub-forums that you’re following will have a boost in ranking in your feed.
  • Threads posted in forum nodes with access restriction will now be properly displayed on the homepage for those that have access to these forum nodes.

Full Forum List

  • When a user follows a forum, we would like to improve the user experience by allowing them to see the forum right away. We did this by increasing the visibility of the followed forums on the main forum index. This change will also drive more traffic to the forum and help improve the new homepage algorithm.

Upgraded Signatures
We evaluated feedback from our users and are working to improve signatures. Some key updates include:

  • Ability to collapse signatures after they have been expanded
  • Preview of image (if first) or text (if first) when signatures minimized 
  • Increased capacity for internal links in signatures

Notable Mentions
We have been gathering feedback from our community members and staff members over the last several months. During this time, our members identified several bugs that we need to fix.  Some of them improve the quality of life for our users, some address user interface issues, etc. Below we have listed the fixes for July with additional fixes slated for August.

August 2020 - Next 30: Upcoming Changes

Card View Project Introduction
In the effort to reduce the white spacing issue on our sites and provide better visual and user experience, we are currently working on a brand new look for our forum system.

Update to Popular Communities 
In an effort to provide content that is relevant to the user, we are updating our Popular Communities section to Recommended Communities. This section will be populated by an algorithm to provide recommendations for the user, based on the community the user is visiting or is a part of.

Notable Mentions
We have continued to gather feedback from our communities and staff members and have scheduled additional time to work on reported bugs this month.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback. We hope to continue to update you on these changes accomplished next month with our weekly releases.

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a selection of new updates and improvements including one particular bug fix we’re very happy to have solved.

7/10 Edit Bug
Perhaps our peskiest bug to date, we’ve squashed another one! This bug had to deal with a user error when attempting to edit a post. The error would alert the user that they are only allowed 7 edits over a 10 day period, however, the user hadn’t done that many edits... or any edits at all. This error has now been corrected.

BBCode Enabled
For those of you are long-time forum users, we don’t need to tell you all the advantages of BBCode. Well, we’re now happy to report that BBCode functionality has now been enabled across all sites for posts. And if you want to view the BBCode for a post, you can view the BBCode thanks to a toggle in the edit bar.

Gallery Feature
Another addition you may have already noticed is our new Gallery feature. To create a gallery, click the site navigation button (the three dots) in the top right corner of the site and then hit the Gallery button. From there you can upload photos to your own gallery. Then, to insert the gallery into a site, just hit the gallery button in your post editor and select the gallery you created.

Images are auto-sized, responsive and swipeable on mobile! We think you’ll agree, it’s a great new addition to the platform!

Improved Search Processing Times
We continue to improve the speed and functionality of the search feature and we’re happy to report that it’s now faster than ever, returning results in significantly improved times. We recommend you try it out.

Coming Soon!
Our feed-driven home page is rolling out this week on a small sample of sites so we can bulk-test with real users on live sites. Next week we’ll roll out a much larger number of sites and we’ll include plenty of info on how it works and how it’ll make your forum experience even better!

As always, thanks for sharing your passions,

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have one main update to let you know about.  

Enhanced WYSIWYG Editor
You asked and we listened!

In response to requests to see a broader range of customization options when making a post, we’ve added numerous new features to the WYSIWYG Editor.

These include:

  • New fonts
  • New font colors
  • A variety of font sizes
  • Font alignment
  • The ability to add tables
  • And more

Be sure to test out the new features and have fun customizing your posts.

Coming Soon!
We promised more of an update on the new home page and while we’re still not quite ready to reveal it, we can now say it’s a new feed-driven design that gives the home page a real purpose - so stay tuned!

As always, thanks for sharing your passions,

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

Recommended Reading
As you may have noticed we’ve begun rolling out a new Recommended Reading widget that appears at the bottom of threads. This is powered by machine learning and is designed to surface threads and topics you may be interested in.

It’s not live on all sites yet, so if you don’t see it, it will be rolled out on your favorite forum soon!

Of note, it includes a one-question survey, asking you if the results shown are helpful to you. Regardless of your answer, we’d appreciate it if you could fill this out!

Premium Membership Reminder
Our Premium Membership option has been a bit hit since we launched it a few months back, so we want make sure everyone is aware of its benefits.

They include:

  1. A reduced ad site experience (banner ads are removed)
  2. Focused reading mode (the option to hide the right column)
  3. Access to exclusive forums 
  4. An exclusive badge on profile avatars 

The price is $19.99 USD, billed annually via PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover. 

For more info click the “Upgrade to Premium” button on the right side widget or in the menu under their avatar. 

Coming Soon! 
We can’t say too much yet, but we’ll be rolling out some updates to the home page in the near future that should greatly improve the experience.

As always, thanks for sharing your passions,

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

You may have noticed we’ve been pretty silent lately. That’s because we’ve been busy.

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.  

Image Bug
We’re excited to announce that a pesky bug has been squashed. As some of you may have noticed, images in sections only available to logged-in members sometimes didn’t show. This was due to a Cloudflare resizing function and we’re happy to report it’s no longer an issue.

Pushy Push Notifications
Improving our popular push notifications feature, we’ve made an update that allows those of you who don’t want to receive notifications, and who don’t want to be asked about it ever again, to permanently deactivate them. Just click the “never” button.

Spam
We haven’t talked much about the updates to our spam filters lately, but we’ve made numerous changes to vastly reduce the amount of spam on the sites. We’ll continue to test new settings and tools to win the war on spam.

Coming Soon!
The Community Management team will soon be reaching out as we look to recruit more moderators to help manage some of our communities. We plan to start this process in June but if you just can’t wait, click the Contact Us button at the bottom of the site and send us a note to volunteer.

As always, thanks for sharing your passions and stay safe out there!

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

Our focus on performance and spam fighting continues this week.

Performance Optimizations 
As previously mentioned, monitoring and making updates as necessary to strive for optimal performance is an ongoing process. We have seen good results on sites where database updates have been made and will continue rolling out database updates to more sites gradually during overnight hours.

Spam Fighting
Last week we reviewed how spam attacks typically come in waves and how we are combating some recent waves of spam attempts. This week, we continue to make changes to existing spam controls and monitor the results closely. We will be implementing changes across more sites this week to further combat the spam attacks some sites are seeing.

Please reach out with any questions or feedback.

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.

FAQ Updates
We’ve updated our site FAQs to provide more information about site functions and features. Members can access site FAQs by clicking the three dots in the top right corner and then FAQ.

Here you’ll find answers to burning questions such as how to find account settings, how to switch between dark and light mode and how to become a Premium Member. Check it out!

Performance Optimizations 
As previously mentioned, monitoring and making updates as necessary to strive for optimal performance is an ongoing process. We have seen good results on sites where database updates have been made and will continue rolling out database updates to more sites gradually during overnight hours.

Bug Fixes
We’ve addressed two bugs this week. One is related to images not displaying under certain conditions. The other bug fix addressed an issue when a member cannot resubmit their credit card information after a failed attempt.

Spam Fighting
Similar to performance monitoring, fighting spam is an ongoing process. Spam attacks typically come in waves where some spammers succeed in getting around existing anti-spam controls.  When this happens, we investigate and make changes to existing controls or implement new anti-spam tools. Then, we monitor closely to determine if further changes are needed.  

This week, we have updated anti-spam control settings on some sites that have seen an increase in spam attempts recently. Once we determine these changes are on the right track to combat this recent wave of spam, we will implement those changes across other sites.

As always, please reach out if you have questions or feedback about your community experience. We love hearing from our members.

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

Continuous improvements are core to bringing you a reliable and increasingly better site with every update. Here are some updates we have for the latest release this week.

Spam Prevention
We’ve made some updates to our reCAPTCHA services during sign-up to make it tougher on bots. This service helps protect the platform from spam and abuse, while letting valid users pass through with ease.

More Performance Optimization 
We are constantly testing new ways to improve our performance and the speed of the site. Your feedback and experiences help us to diagnose any issues and deliver improvements. We have continued to rollout database updates to improve speed and reliability on the platform.

Please continue to send us your feedback. Your insights are extremely powerful in helping us to support your community better.

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.  

Visual Improvements & Performance Optimization 
We have fixed the spacing in the General Info and Modification Info sections on some sites to be more visually appealing. We also continue database upgrades on sites each evening to address performance issues. When a site is scheduled for that upgrade, we activate a notification on the site to let members know. For those sites that have already been upgraded, we have seen improvements in performance statistics, which is great news.  Thank you for your patience as we work through those updates.  

Bug Squashed
This week our team released a fix for a bug that allowed members to purchase multiple Premium Membership subscriptions under certain conditions. Although we appreciate the support, one purchase per site is all that will be allowed. 

As many of us find ourselves spending more time at home due to events taking place in the world, we are so thankful for the technology that connects us all. We hope you continue to connect in your communities, and are sharing knowledge on the things you love. We are always looking for ways to improve your community experience. Please let us know if you have concerns, suggestions or feedback.  

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have some visual improvements and bug fixes up for release.   

Visual Improvements 
We’ve corrected a spacing issue where page numbers didn’t have enough space between each number. We have also updated some title headings to be consistent across the site. And lastly, we corrected a typo for the word “showcase” in the Account Preference page.

Bug Fixes
We’ve resolved a few bugs this week as well. First up is an issue where the Trending section of the homepage sometimes displayed no content. We’ve also corrected an issue that required a member to verify their email address after an admin approves their account registration. And finally, when a forum has many sub-forums, we changed to a drop down menu to allow a scrollable area with a fixed height. 

Performance Updates Continue
As mentioned last week, nightly database updates will continue across the environment to improve speed and reliability for sites. These updates will take place during slower traffic times and a notification will be set alerting members before the maintenance window starts. Thanks again for your patience as we continue our focus on improving performance.  

Don’t hesitate to let us know your thoughts on how the site is functioning, features you’d like to see, or any other feedback you have.  

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators, 

Visual Improvements
This week we have a couple of updates that you may notice. We completed a visual overhaul on the conversation landing page. Also, we updated the subforum description displayed in the right column to no longer be truncated.  

Performance Updates 
Performance monitoring is done on an ongoing basis to strive for a fast, stable browsing experience for members. We have included some small changes in Release 44, but will also be applying some database updates across our environment over the next several weeks. Sites will see an additional maintenance period that will last a bit longer than the usual Tuesday maintenance period for new releases. These maintenance periods should last less than one hour and will be targeted for lower traffic times for each site. 

As always, creating an enjoyable community experience for you is our priority. Please continue letting us know your thoughts. It is greatly appreciated.  

Your Community Support Team 

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few performance enhancements, a couple of bugs squashed and a new feature to announce.

Bugs Fixes & Performance Enhancement
This week we’ve made some enhancements to search performance, fixed an issue where searching less than three words sometimes returns no results and fixed the site logo when sharing to Facebook or Twitter. 

Premium Membership has Arrived 
We are excited to announce an updated version of our Premium Membership is now available. We’re introducing it as a way for members to give back to their communities -- as all proceeds go to re-investing in this platform -- and to improve their site experience. Our site is ad-supported, but many people don’t like to see ads. A Premium Membership is a way to improve their time on the site and give them exclusive access to some features. The site will continue to be supported by ads, so the site will continue to be free to use (with ads) for people who are not interested in the Premium Membership. 

The price is $19.99 USD, billed annually. We currently only support the USD currency, however people can still purchase the membership wherever they are in the world. We support PayPal payments, along with Visa, Mastercard, American Express & Discover. The features of Premium Membership are: 

  1. A reduced ad site experience (banner ads are removed)
  2. Focused reading mode (the option to hide the right column)
  3. Access to exclusive forums 
  4. An exclusive badge on profile avatars 

Members can unsubscribe from these automatic payments at any time. Members who cancel will retain their Premium Membership until one year from the date of their sign up. 

Members can find information about Premium Membership by clicking “Upgrade to Premium” in the right side widget or in the menu under their avatar. Members can also find purchase options in their Account Settings under Account Details or Account Upgrades. 

Previously, some communities had Lifetime Memberships available to members. These members will now have the Premium Membership experience (and will receive those benefits for their lifetime). New Lifetime Memberships are no longer available on the new platform. For any user who already has a Premium Membership, and they paid more than the new $19.99 USD price, we are messaging them to let them know the steps they should take to make sure their renewal happens at the new rate.

We’ll continue to focus on site performance and and feature enhancements to improve your community experience.  Please continue letting us know your feedback as we go along.  

Your Community Support Team 

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This is your weekly update to let you know what’s new for your community. 

Visual improvements & Bug Fixes
We’ve made some updates to how some things look. There has been a small change to how conversations are viewed. The number of showcases shown per page has been increased to 35. 

On the bug front, we fixed an issue where sometimes editing an old post would generate an error related to only being able to apply 5 tags to that post. And we’ve also resolved an issue with avatars blurring when a member navigates to a new page.  

Sync release numbers
You might notice this release appears to jump ahead into the future to 42. In addition to being the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, it’s also the current internal release number our developers use. To simplify, we’ve updated the public release number to be in sync with our internal release number. These will remain in sync from now on.

Coming Soon! 
There are more updates coming to improve site speed and we’ll be releasing a new Premium Membership experience within the next week or two. Please keep an eye on release notes to find out the latest information on those and other features released. We appreciate your input and look forward to hearing from you!

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

We’ve got a couple of updates to let you know about this week’s release.  

Visual Fixes and Improvements
We’ve made some small visual updates to buttons and input fields in dark mode. This should improve viewability for those who prefer the dark mode experience. 

We've also made some visual tweaks to prefix tags and have added a new tool tip for user badges.

Image Resizing 
We've made some changes to how images are resized. This optimization will reduce the file size of an image by compressing and resizing it, without compromising the quality of the image. This fix should help improve the site's speed and performance. 

Push Notification
We have fixed an issue where notification prompt still occurs after clicking “not now”

Timestamp Format
Time stamp format is now shortened:

2 days ago → 2 d ago

13 hours ago → 13 h ago

10 minutes ago → 10 m ago

5 months ago → 5 mo ago

Topical Profile Info
You can now add specific information to personalize your profile. This information will be easy to see and share underneath your avatar in posts. You can find out more in your profile settings.

Coming Soon! 
There are more updates coming to improve site speed. Please keep an eye on release notes to find out the latest information on those and other features released. We appreciate your input and look forward to hearing more!

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.  

Password Reset by Username 
If you’ve ever forgotten which email address is connected to your account, it can be a real challenge to figure out where a password reset email has been sent.  But not any more! Now, members will have the ability to enter their username or their email address when requesting a password reset.  After entering a username, a message confirming that an email has been sent will be shown.  For privacy, the full email address will not be displayed.

This will help members get back to posting in their favorite community after a password reset.  

Visual Polish 
We’ve made some small visual updates to the header avatar and how gallery images are displayed.  

Advanced Search
Yes, there are more updates this week to the evolving Advanced Search feature.  We’ve made changes to the search button and popup, the Search Date input and the toggle between “Most Recent” and “Most Relevant”.  We will continue to make updates as needed to make searching fast and easy so you can find the important information you need. 

Thanks to our members, we have received amazing feedback allowing us to know what’s important to you, what you think works well and where you would like to see new features and improvements.  We appreciate those who have taken the time to share their thoughts. Keep them coming! Your voice matters!  

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

We’ve got a couple of updates to let you know about for this week’s release.  

Advanced Search 
We’ve made an update to make search easier to use. Now, clicking the Search button without entering anything in the search field input will take the member to the advanced search page.  

Moved Discussion Threads
We’ve also made a change to how moved threads behave to ensure that members can always find a thread that may have been moved.     

After a thread is moved, the old URL of the thread will exist permanently and anyone who accesses the old link will automatically be redirected to the new URL.  The visible link in the forum where the discussion was originally posted will be visible for up to 30 days, as determined by the moderator team. 

Dark Mode
And finally, we’ve applied some polish to dark mode to improve overall color and contrast.  This should improve viewability for those who prefer the dark mode experience.

That wraps up progress for this week.  Keep an eye out for some exciting updates coming within the next couple of months. 

Your Community Support Team 

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

We have some exciting updates for you this week regarding search, alerts & notifications and a few cosmetic changes to some views.  

Advanced Search
As we continue to evolve the Advanced Search feature, you can now search using exact match, must include and must exclude terms to help you find the information you need faster.  Use quotation marks for an exact match, a plus sign for must include and a minus sign for must exclude.  

Push Notifications
Last week we mentioned sites will now support allowing push notifications from a member’s web browser.  We will start rolling this feature out to sites throughout the next couple of weeks.   

Once released to a site, members can navigate to Account Settings, then Preferences, where they can enable push notifications and edit other notification settings.    

Alerts
We’ve also made a change to how long alerts are visible.  Previously, unviewed alerts would clear after 30 days and viewed alerts would clear after 4 days.  We heard from members that wish to have alerts visible for a longer period of time. Now, both viewed and unviewed alerts will be cleared after 90 days.  

Various Updates to How Things Look
You may notice some slight changes on some views for better alignment for content and user profile information.  We’ve also made a change on the thread listing page. We’ve increased the number of threads per page from 20 to 35, so members can see more threads in one page.  

Whew, that was a busy week, but we aren’t done yet.  

Admin Control Panel
We have some exciting news for site administrators!  We will be rolling out our Admin Control Panel (ACP) this week!  Once access is granted, an administrator will see an “Admin” link in the upper right corner for the Admin Control Panel.  Just a reminder: 2 Factor Authentication must be enabled before accessing the Admin Control Panel.    

Admins will find frequently asked questions for the ACP in the Help section of the site. Click the three-dot menu button next to the avatar, then click on FAQ. 

Help FAQs can also be found by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking Help

As always, please continue to let us know your thoughts and feedback. It’s what drives change and helps us prioritize new features. 

Your Community Support Team

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

This week we have a few updates to let you know about.  

Two Factor Authentication 
To increase security related to logging in, members can set up 2-factor authentication in their Account Settings on the Password and security tab. This ensures that logins for an account use another step to authenticate if the device being used is not recognized. Members can set up a second authentication method, such as email or a separate authentication app.  This is especially important for those with higher-level permission access, like Administrators. As we get closer to releasing a new Admin Control Panel (ACP) view, those with administrator level permissions will be prompted to set up 2 factor authentication before they can access the new ACP.


 

Coming Soon! Push Notifications
Coming soon - members will be able to allow push notifications in their browser, so they can keep up to date on the latest activity on the site: 

Once released to all sites, members can navigate to Account Settings, then Preferences, where they can enable push notifications and edit other notification settings.    

Various Bug Fixes
We’ve also resolved a few bugs, specifically one related to contextual search not searching properly and another related to images not displaying properly.  There was also an update made to some mobile views to align icons a bit better. 

Even More Coming Soon
Premium Membership is still on track to be released within the next few weeks and as previously mentioned, a new Admin Control Panel view for Administrators is on the horizon as well.  Please keep an eye on release notes to find out the latest information on those and other features released. 

Please continue letting us know your feedback! We really appreciate it. 

Your Community Support Team 

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

Our first release of the new year contains a couple of exciting updates. 

Editing Posts
The new edit limits feature includes unlimited editing of new posts - fix that typo or add more details as often as you like, within 24 hours of posting.   

To summarize how editing works, members have unlimited editing of new posts for the first 24 hours after posting.  Up to 10 existing posts (older than 24 hours) may be edited per week. More editing will be allowed as each of those 10 edits expires every 7 days.  

Improved Search
We are excited to introduce more search functionality to help members find the information they need faster and easier.  Now, you can search the entire site or narrow down to a specific forum or discussion that you are currently viewing.

As always, each release includes squashing a bug or two and performance improvements behind the scenes.  

We appreciate the feedback we receive from our members and look forward to bringing more features and improvements in the coming year.  From the entire Community Support team, we wish you a happy and healthy 2020.

Your Community Support Team 

Dear Community Members and Moderators,

As we approach the end of the year, we have a few updates to announce.  

Restyling of Action Buttons
We’ve done some restyling of the action buttons on a post to make it less visually cluttered. We’ve also moved the Report function to the three dot overflow action button. 

Edit Limits Updated
We’ve heard a lot of feedback on editing limits on posts, especially older posts that may contain outdated information.  Because of that, we’ve made some changes to editing permissions. Members now have unlimited edit permissions for up to 10 discussion posts, 10 showcase posts and 10 gallery posts per week. That will allow those who wish to update a project thread, correct a typo or update event information to do so, even if the post is from months ago.  

As always, moderating team members will have access to edit as they always have.  

Members can access the edit function on their own posts by clicking the three dot action button next to the timestamp on their post.  

We also fixed a few bugs, updated some CSS and made some background performance enhancements.  

Coming soon! 
As previously mentioned, the new Premium Membership experience will be coming after the first of the year. Work continues behind the scenes for that feature.  Work is also in progress to improve notifications. Stay tuned for those changes in the coming weeks.  

On behalf of the entire team, we wish you all a happy and healthy New Year.  

Your Community Support Team

Hello community members & moderators, 

As we approach the holidays, we have a couple of updates to let you know about. 

Updates to Userbit Information
We’ve made a few visual changes to how user information is displayed on profiles. We’ve moved the badge shield to the right, to prevent any blocking of the member’s chosen avatar image. We’ve also moved the “online” green dot indicator before the member’s username.  This should help make the member’s online status indicator a bit more intuitive and visible.

Embedded Image Thumbnails
We’ve also made an update to ensure thumbnails are displayed for embedded images.   Various performance tweaks and behind the scenes work took place, as well.  

Premium Membership is Coming
In the new year, we look forward to bringing Premium Membership to our new platform.  This has been mentioned in a few updates and the team is making great progress. Stay tuned for more information on that feature in future release notes.  

Happy Holidays! 
We appreciate the contributions each member makes to the community.  The entire Community Support team wishes each and every member a very happy, peaceful and enjoyable holiday.  

Your Community Support Team

Hello community members & moderators, 

We’ve had a busy week.  Here are the updates we’ve made.  

Find FAQs Faster
First, we’ve made it more intuitive and easier to find help when you need it. The site FAQs link is now displayed on the ellipse menu (the three dots next to your avatar).  Click the ellipse menu and then click FAQ. Tada! 

 

Profile Rollover Redesign
Next, we’ve spent some time redesigning the profile rollover. We’ve made the colors a bit easier on the eyes, cleaned up some duplicate information and improved the spacing on that view.  This should make it easier to see what is important (and look a bit prettier, too). It’s also more clear how to follow or message a member. Check it out and let us know what you think!

 

Page Loading & Bug Smashing
We’ve also made some updates to how pages load, which will continue to improve speed, getting you the information you need faster.  

And finally, we’ve smashed a few bugs, including one impacting animated gifs that didn’t want to animate. 

We look forward to hearing your input as we continue to provide community updates each week! 

Your Community Support Team

Community Members and Moderators,

Hello! This week, we have two exciting changes to announce.  

Avatars

We’ve received quite a lot of feedback regarding avatars. Avatars are a great way to let other members know a little bit about each other. As a result, we have updated avatars to display in a square shape, rather than round and made the size of the avatar a bit bigger. This will better display some of the interesting photos our members select to represent themselves in their community.  

Search results

Next, as we continue to build and expand search functionality, we have updated search to display up to 500 results. We will continue to monitor performance and feedback as our search technology evolves, to make it easier to find important information you want!  

General Housekeeping

We’ve also done some general housekeeping, removing some no longer needed code, squashed a few bugs and made some improvements in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, for inquiring minds) for faster page loading.  

Check out those changes and keep the feedback coming. We appreciate hearing your thoughts! 

Your Community Support Team

Community Members and Moderators,

This past week, while we have been developing some bigger feature improvements for you, we have also tidied up a little.  Effort spent on fixing a broken link here and there, better scrolling, and as always, improving site speed - just makes the community work better for everyone.

Coming Soon!

Avatars & Avatar Badging
We know how important it is to showcase your passions and interests to the community so we are working on updating avatars and badging.

Based on your feedback and ongoing collaboration, we will roll out several improvements starting next week to accommodate a wider variety of image sizes and enlarge the profile picture.   We look forward to hearing your input as we continue to provide community updates each week! Keep the feedback coming….

Your Community Support Team

Community Members and Moderators,

We have a few updates this week to share as well as progress reports on new features!

Search Performance

Several performance enhancements have been done to search indexing to improve the speed of showing results.

We are also actively working on showing more results per keyword search.  Additional results will be released in the next couple of weeks.

More Coming Soon!

Profile Rollovers

We have added some additional information to your user bit within posts but we are also improving your profile rollover.  This is all about you! This space highlights who you are to the community and makes it easier to meet fellow members.

We look forward to hearing your input as we continue to provide platform updates week to week!

Your Community Support Team

Community Members,

We have a couple of exciting and new things to present for platform improvement updates this week.

Image File Size Increased

The file size for images has been increased to 20MB, which should allow members to upload images more easily without having to resize them. Make your showcase shine and post those beautiful pictures for all to see! 

New Navigation - Roll out

For some of you that visit your community every day, you may notice a difference in the navigation to new posts and the forum list page. We wanted to make them faster and easier to find. This is still rolling out to all sites over the next couple of weeks. Let us know what you think of the design and functionality!

Performance Enhancements

Behind the scenes work continues to improve search functionality and lay the groundwork for other features in the coming weeks.  

Coming Soon!

Avatars

We will be implementing larger avatars on desktop view very soon, which will better showcase those images you choose to represent you. 

Premium Membership

Members who wish to contribute to the community by becoming a Premium Member will have easier access to the Premium Membership feature in the upcoming month. Stay tuned for more information.  

Thanks again for your continued feedback and engagement with our new platform. We appreciate your input and look forward to hearing more.  

Your Community Support Team

Community Members,

A summary for you on the platform improvement updates for this week.  

Member Location - Country

Communities are all about connections. To help this, we have launched country flags for your member information within posts. Find members closer to you, ask about hard to get models or products outside your borders or make a new buddy from far away!  

Setting Your Location

Click on your avatar, near the upper right-hand corner of the site. Select account settings from the drop-down menu.

On the account settings page, scroll down to location. 

As you start typing your city, it will offer you choices appear in the drop-down menu. Click to select on the one that displays your location.

If you prefer to only display your state, simply type your state, and then click on it in the drop-down menu.

Within discussion threads, you will see your country flag displayed under your username.

Performance 

Ongoing performance improvements help the site continue to run smoothly.  That just makes sense for everyone! 

More Coming Soon!

Avatars

We have listened to your feedback about your avatars! We will be implementing larger avatars on the desktop view very soon.

Premium Membership

Many of you are already existing and past premium members and we thank you for your commitment to the site and community.  For those of you interested in joining our premium club, we will be rolling out easier access to this feature in the upcoming month.  

Thanks again for your continued feedback and engagement with our new platform. We hope you have enjoyed these regular improvements. 

Your Community Support Team

Community Members,

We wanted to reach out to all of you and provide an update on new features, fixes, and improvements to your community platform.  

Tapatalk Fix

We appreciate your patience as we have been working in concert with the Tapatalk team to improve the uploading and experience with images on mobile devices.  We have launched a fix today that should address any remaining intermittent issues. The solution is optimized for the latest software, please upgrade to the most recent version of the Tapatalk app.  Let us know if the experience is working better for you!

User Location - Upcoming 

It’s easier to connect with your fellow community members if you know where they are coming from, literally!  We are improving the appearance of your country of origin within your profile details in the discussion threads.  This is expected to launch in the upcoming week.

 

New Posts - Upcoming 

We have heard your feedback and understand that you want to get to new posts even faster!  In the next 2 weeks we are testing new navigational designs that aim to make this easier for you.  


Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

Community Members,

We would like to highlight two new feature improvements with this week’s release.

Badging 

We appreciate all our community members and guests. Some of you have taken on additional roles as site moderators, premium members, and sponsoring businesses.  As an acknowledgment of your efforts, you are identified now through member badges on your avatar. This should help your fellow community members find and recognize you more easily!  


Premium and Lifetime Premium members have a star and circle around their avatar.


Vendors have a storefront at the bottom of their avatars


Premium Vendors have a storefront and circle around their avatar.


Our community staff members are identified by the lightning bolt at the bottom of their avatars.


Premium staff members have a lighting bolt and a circle around their avatar.

Compact Layout

Thank you for all the feedback on the layout and placement of the content. In an effort to reduce scrolling and make the design slightly more compact, we have made some adjustments.  You’ve probably already noticed! Now, this can be tricky to get right for everyone but we hope this helps you navigate the site easier and faster. 

 

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

Community Members & Moderators,

We would like to announce two feature improvements launching this week, based on our collaboration with our members. 

Jump to Forum 

Once you are done reading a discussion thread, we have made it easier to get the full forum listing from a handy menu at the bottom of the page.  We hope this helps you get where you want to go...only faster!


Advanced Search Filters

Thank you for all the feedback and insights on how you are using or want to use search within your community.  We have introduced advanced search filters by recency, by forum and by thread.  As we need to index additional content within the site for our AI powered search algorithm (www.vespa.ai ), this may take a few days to display on the site.  We are looking forward to your feedback and thank you for your patience!

If you are new to using Advanced Search filters, there is a “How To” guide listed below.  

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team 

How To Access Advanced Search

If you have already entered your search words in the search bar but want to narrow down your results or choose to search only certain forum selections, click on “Advanced Search”.

This will allow you to choose to search titles only, add the member username who posted it or even select a specific forum to search from the scroll menu within search in forums.

If you prefer to go directly to advanced search, you can access it under the 3 vertical dots at the top right-hand corner of the community.

Hi All,

Easier and faster multi-quote feature is here! Please review the how-to below and let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Your Community Support Team

How To Multi-Quote

Step 1: Click the multi-quote icon at the bottom of each post that you want to quote.

 

Step 2: Scroll down to the text editor where you are going to write your post. Click "Insert Quotes".

Step 3: A small window will pop up for you to verify (or delete) quoted content that will be added to your post. Click "Quote messages".

Final Step: The quoted content will automatically be added to the text editor. Add your comments and click to post your reply.

Added Notes: You can multi-quote from more than one discussion thread in the forum. You can also simply highlight the part of the text you want to quote. A Small popup will allow you to choose the multi-quote option using just the selected content.

 

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

Reaching out to those who like to use a Desktop and wide-screen monitor - this one’s for you!  We have introduced support for a wider screen experience over 1600 pixels to bring more content up higher on the screen and take advantage of the extra space.  We hope you enjoy the view! 

Multi-quote & Advanced Search

Both of these are in development now with our engineering team.  We are looking forward to delivering them to you in the upcoming weeks.

Please continue to provide us feedback - the insights have been really helpful and are appreciated!

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

We would like to announce some improvements and progress based on community feedback and in-thread comments.  We appreciate your patience and willingness to work with us.

Last Poster is Back 

You wanted to see the last member to post in a discussion. It is important and we heard you. Your discussion listings have been updated. We hope this makes it easier to find the topics that are most interesting to you.  

Tapatalk 

We have updated the Tapatalk plugin, which should resolve an issue with images posted by Android Tapatalk being visible through browsers. We are also actively working with Tapatalk support to iron out bugs related to using the app and an issue with Android Tapatalk users being able to view some images. We also encourage all to keep their Tapatalk app up-to-date and on the latest version so all software can play nice together!

COMING SOON!

An update on some of the additional features and improvements that members have been providing feedback on. 

Widescreen 

You like big monitors!  The site has been adapted to bring more of the content up higher on the page and wider to accommodate the extra pixels.  We expect this to be delivered in 1-2 weeks.

Multi-quote

Wanna quote lots of great content in your posts?  We have made that easier and you can expect that to launch in the next 1-2 weeks as well.  

Advanced Search 

We are a few weeks away from delivery on advanced search but development is in progress.  We are utilizing www.vespa.ai to make search even better and more powerful for the community now and into the future.    

If you have more questions, please let us know in the ‘We Are Now Live Community Feedback’ discussion thread. There are more improvements still to come, based on your feedback and collaboration.  We will sign off for now and let you get back to your community!  

Aug 22, 2019 - New Signature Options!

All Community Members and Staff,

Personalizing your experience and telling the community more about yourself is an important part of being a member here.  We have heard your feedback on having more options with text and images in your signature. We are happy to announce that those improvements are here!  

Below are some additional details on how to make your signature all about YOU!  We’ve also included some instructions on personalizing your display of the site to show or hide signatures, depending on your preferences.  We look forward to your feedback and launching more features and improvements in the weeks to come!

Signature Options

  • Your signature can include up to 4 lines, a maximum of 1000 characters and one link Anytime you hit "enter" on your keyboard, it will automatically go to a new line

  • You can include images but an image also counts as a line 

  • Images will automatically be resized to 300 x 200 pixels to optimize display across all screen types

  • You can see more options in your settings to collapse signatures, always view full signature, or to not see signatures at all. The choice is yours.

Fun fact: Both guests and members can view signatures, however, members have more options!

If a member has their preferences set to the default they will see collapsed signatures as in the example below for them. (They can click to see more.)

If a user has their preferences set to always show expanded signatures it will look like the example below for them. Your image can be clicked to view full size.

If you want to adjust your preferences for signatures you can click on your avatar near the upper right-hand corner of the site and select account settings.

In the left side navigation, you will see an option for preferences. Click it.

Scroll down to content options and select your signature preferences.

If you have more questions, please let us know in the ‘We Are Now Live Community Feedback’ discussion thread. Thank you again for all your help and collaboration in making this community better each day. 

Your Community Support Team

Hi All Staff & Community Members, 

There are a diverse set of members and guests that are active within your community.  We welcome all kinds of voices and want to ensure that this site is a place to share opinions in a safe and appropriate way, especially for visitors under the age of 18 years.  As such, we have introduced a filter for sensitive images that may not be appropriate for a younger audience or those who choose not to view certain types of image content.  

VIEW IMAGE CONTENT

As a guest or member who wants to view one image at a time, you can always click to "Show Content".  Again, this provides a way for all members to engage and participate in the community.  

As a member, if you would like to view all image content at any time, you can go to your account settings preferences to adjust.  We hope this makes the community more active and welcome for all. 

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

We would like to tell you about improvements that are not quite ready yet but are coming soon!  As you have already heard us say numerous times now, we are truly listening to your feedback. As active community members, you know what key features are important to enable your participation and engagement in the community. There are a few key items that are continually coming up as more immediate priorities for you.  While this is not the entire list, we did want to share updates in the following areas.

Advanced Search Options:

Our development team is actively working on developing an advanced search feature that will better help find exactly what you are looking for. This is a priority for all of us.  

We’ve also heard that searching within threads and forums is critical as well as being able to filter by date and thread title.  While there are more search functions that can be added, we want to work towards delivering you better Search as soon as possible.  Let us know if we are on the right track. 

Signatures: 

Personalizing your experience is an important part of being a member here.  We have heard your feedback on having more options with text and images in your signature.  We are launching a solution in the next couple of weeks to allow for this. We hope you like it! 

Display on Wider Screens:

The designers are actively making adjustments to accommodate for wider monitors and higher resolutions.  As this will affect the display of the site, there is some complexity around the changes to ensure it still works well on ALL devices.  We appreciate your patience here and look forward to delivering this improvement very soon. 

Showing Locations: 

This community is a great way to bring together people from all parts of the globe.  We have heard many times that there is interest to show your member location more prominently near your avatar.  We are working on a better way to achieve this. In the meantime, you can adjust your location within your profile settings to show when you roll over a member avatar with your mouse.

Much of this feedback has come from your posts within the Community Feedback discussion thread.  We do check regularly and often. Thank you again for all your help in making this community better each day. 

Hi All Staff & Community Members, 

We want to announce new improvements based on your  feedback and significant community collaboration. The upgrade this week is specifically focused on personalizing your membership experience and account settings even further. 

Sensitive Content

There are a diverse set of members and guests that are active within your community.  We welcome all kinds of voices and want to ensure that this site is a place to share opinions in a safe and appropriate way, especially for visitors under the age of 18 years.  As such, we have introduced a filter for sensitive images that may not be appropriate for a younger audience or those who choose not to view certain types of image content. As a member you can keep the default settings or go to your account settings preferences to adjust. As a guest or member who wants to view one image at a time, you can always click to "Show Content".  We hope this makes the community more active and welcome for all. 

Performance & Bug Fixes

As always, we are cleaning up small errors and working on page speed.  You can expect this to be ongoing maintenance that just makes the site work better.  Enjoy!

If you have any additional comments or questions, please reach out to your site admins for post in the community feedback section.  We continue to monitor this discussion thread regularly.

Hi All Community Members and Staff,

This week’s update features additional improvements based on user feedback and the ongoing collaboration within the community.  We are encouraged to see the trial of some of our new profile settings and pages like Showcase, My Discussions and Participated Discussions.  These are all ways to contribute and interact with your fellow members and guests. The following are details to take note of with this week’s upgrade.

Get to New Posts Faster

Have you checked out the popular section?  It’s well...very popular!  We heard feedback that seeing the most popular discussions is good but folks would also like to quickly get to new posts.  We’ve made this easier by implementing a drop-down from the popular icon. This should provide options to go straight to popular, new posts or any of the sections within that tab.  Let us know what you think!

Highlighting

When highlighting text, we’ve made that more visible both in light and dark mode.  Plain and simple.  

Performance & Bug Fixes

Your community should be fast and work well.  We couldn’t agree more! That’s why we added even more page speed improvements and some general fixes to the alignment of images & avatars.  Enjoy!

We continue to monitor posts within the Community Feedback discussion thread regularly if you have questions or feedback.  The positive communication and collaboration is what helps us deliver great new features and improvements to you every week!  

Community Members and Staff,

Hi all - Another weekly update from your community support team to tell you about updates to your site platform.  These improvements and new features are based on your feedback and we appreciate your ongoing collaboration with us. Like you, we want to continue to see this community thrive and grow! Below are details outlining key items to take note of with this week’s upgrade.

Home Page Improvements

The home page is like the front door to welcome both members and guests to your community.  It is always important to make a good first impression and so the technology teams supporting this software have worked to make the home page load faster! This includes optimizing images and data usage across all device types. We hope you enjoy a speedier experience!

Discussion Starter

There is a wealth of information and insights in your community. When following along on a thread sometimes you want to know, “who started this discussion”? This is now indicated within all relevant posts as Discussion Starter. We hope this helps make it easier to contribute, reply and engage with your fellow members.

Uploading Photos 

Uploading your photos and creating a showcase is a great way to share your interests and expertise within your community. We’ve made uploading images easier both on the site as well as with supported partners like Tapatalk. Click, snap and upload to your hearts’ content, we can’t wait to see your latest pics!

Thanks to all of you who have provided valuable feedback. We hope you have enjoyed the upgrades and new features we have released weekly. For those of you who have a question, comment or just want to say “Thanks!”, we are monitoring posts within the Community Feedback discussion thread regularly. 

Community Members and Staff,

We aim to provide ongoing improvements and new features as our commitment to this community.  Your feedback and suggestions help us to build a plan that works to meet your needs and we are thankful for this collaboration.  Below are the details of key things to look out for this week in the upgrade.

Your Profile & Settings Page

Completing your profile page is a great way to let your fellow community members and guests know more about you.  This page has had some polish added and a simplified design. Set up a signature, find out about your trophies & reactions and see all your settings in one place.  This area of the site is all about YOU! You’ll find these pages in the drop down menu under your avatar in the main menu.

Even More Browser Support

We continue to hear feedback on the need for support and compatibility for older browsers.  This week we have improved the site layout and functionality for Internet Explorer 11. Let us know if things are working better for you!

My Discussions & Participated Discussions

By following (previously watching) forums and discussion threads, you can keep tabs on key areas of the community that interest you the most.  We’ve also added quick links to discussion threads that you may have started, My Discussions, as well as Participated Discussions. These are discussions that you have contributed to.  This is an easy way to keep track of where you are interacting and contributing the most!  This information can all be found in the “Following” section. 

Please continue to send us your questions in our Community Feedback discussion thread and let us know what you think of the new updates.  Your feedback has been extremely important to the continued improvements you see on the site.

Community Members and Staff,

We hope you are enjoying the new platform and have found value in the new features and software solutions that aim to make the site work better. Thank you for your ongoing feedback as you use the site. As part of our continued efforts to reply and act on your suggestions, the following are some key things to look out for this week in the upgrade.

Find Members Online

This community is a great way to share ideas, learn and meet members with shared interests.  To find other members that are online at the same time as you, you can “view all” members and see specifically who is “online”.  This is a great way to make connections. 

More Browser Support

We recognize that the community uses a variety of browsers to access this site.  We’ve been working to improve compatibility for older browsers over the last month and hope this provides a better experience for members overall.  Let us know if things are working better for you!

Finding Your Way Around

Change can be hard, we get it.  That’s why we’ve launched an online tour to highlight some of the new features and introduce names that you may not be used to.  We hope this helps finding, reading, posting and uploading that much easier. It only takes a few seconds to take the tour - join us!

Please continue to send us your questions in our Community Feedback thread discussion and let us know what you think of the new updates.  Your opinion matters and feeds directly into our product improvements!

Site staff and members, thank you for your continued feedback. We aim to offer solutions to improve your community with each release. We have another update for you as part of our continued efforts to respond to and action your comments, ideas, and suggestions. The following are some key things to look out for.

Online

Want to tell your fellow community members that you are online and ready to chat? This setting in your profile will allow you to adjust your avatar appearance If you want to indicate that you are online or control if fellow members can see if you are available.  Look for the small green icon below the profile picture.  

Reply Now

Find unanswered threads and discussions where fellow community members are looking for replies.  Looking for Replies can now be found in the Popular section.  This is a great way to jump into conversations about your favorite topics!

Software Foundation

Our goal is to build your community site on a more modern, stable and maintained software platform. XenForo has provided this foundation and your site has now been updated to the latest version 2.1.2.  This base will help us to continue to deliver improvements and new features for you moving forward. 

Please continue to send us your questions in our Community Feedback thread discussion and let us know what you think of the new updates.  Your opinion matters!

You spoke, We listened.  Thank you for all your insightful feedback.  We have another update for you this week that we are very excited about and hope will increase your enjoyment of the site.  Some key things to look out for in this latest release, as we aim to deliver continuous improvements.

Post Numbers 

We have added in clear post numbers beside each post to make it easier to follow a large discussion and quote or link to a particular reply.  We hope that participating in your community conversations just got easier!

Find All Staff & Members

Whether you are new to the community or a long time member; it is always nice to connect with fellow enthusiasts and staff that share your interests.  Click on view all to get more details on your community.

Image Loading Performance

We have made software enhancements to enable the images to load based on your screen resolution and to reduce the need for data usage on a mobile device.  Better images that load faster and easier - just for you!  

Please continue to send us your feedback and let us know what you think of the changes, we are constantly looking at ways to improve the community experience for you.

We have more great updates to share with you this week based on your feedback and the use of your new community platform. Continuous improvements are core to bringing you a reliable and increasingly better site every day. Here are some key things to look out for in this latest release.

Sticky Discussion Threads 

Some discussions just need to be read!  These are sticky and we heard feedback that sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the sticky discussion threads and the regular discussions.  We have updated the design and layout so now sticky discussions have a pin beside the title and a large grey bar at the bottom. We hope this makes it easier to browse the content and find the information that is most important to you as a community member.

View Counts

There were a few areas of the sites where the view counts were not showing consistently.  We have addressed the display issue. We hope this helps you find the most read and popular content more easily.  

Recent Searches

Our new search service is a great way to find information on the site.  Even better, your site will remember your most recent searches to help you find information more quickly.  The search bar is always on the top of the site, whenever you need it!

Performance

More performance improvements! Fast loading pages are just better for everyone and we couldn’t agree more.  Please continue to send us your feedback and let us know if you see an improvement, we are constantly working on making the site faster and faster.  

Your insights are extremely powerful in helping us to support your community better.   Please keep them coming!

In an effort to bring you consistent improvements to your community experience, you will receive update notices from us frequently.  These updates are based on continuously supporting the technology that powers your community as well as introducing new and improved features based on your feedback.  We have released another platform update today and here are some key things to look out for:

Following 

Following a thread is a great way to stay up-to-date on the topic, and receive alerts or emails when there are new replies. Thread subscriptions and watched threads are now called “Followed”.  Threads are referred to as “Discussions”. Your followed content can be accessed by clicking on your user avatar, and clicking “Following”. We have improved the performance and added view counts to your followed discussions to better organize your favorites. 

 

New Posts

Looking for the latest posts in the most popular discussions?  These are easy to find using the quick link at the top of the page to head over to popular discussions.  There is a tab that lists new posts specifically so you can stay on top of “what’s new”. 

 

Dark Mode

We have heard great feedback about our new dark mode.  As one of our favorite features, dark mode allows you to access the site with a power-saving and easier on the eyes layout. You can access it through the right-hand drop-down menu.  We are continuously improving the readability in this low light state.  Let us know what you think!

Performance

We are constantly testing new ways to improve our performance and the speed of the site.  Your feedback and experiences help us to diagnose any issues and deliver improvements. We have added to our infrastructure recently to provide more horsepower and there are continued improvements to page performance coming in the next couple of weeks.  Please continue to send us your feedback. Your insights are extremely powerful in helping us to support your community better. 

Reaching out to inform you of new features and functionality with the new site software release today! This is part of our ongoing commitment to bring improvements to your community based on your feedback. Here are some things to look out for:

Popular and Following Sections

Hot on the release of improved navigation to the popular threads and following threads sections, we have cleaned up the design to make it easier to read and manage your favorites. We have listened to your feedback on these valuable sections and will continue to launch additional improvements in the coming weeks.  

Dark Mode

If you haven’t tried dark mode yet, you can access it through your drop-down menu.  We have improved the readability so you can enjoy your community on your computer or mobile device in low light situations.  Try it now!

Accessibility

Ensuring that as many folks can access the site and the communities is of the utmost importance.  We have improved some of the contrasts within the designs and text, increased button sizes for mobile and improved screen reader functionality to increase accessibility for all. 

We look forward to hearing your feedback on the latest improvements.

We are happy to reach out and let you know about another update to the site software today.  Our hope is to provide continuous improvement and respond to your feedback. Here are some things to look out for:

Email Identifiers:

We have updated the email templates with the new site logos so you should always know that the community email communication is safe and legitimate. 

Showcase Details: 

Your showcase details page design has been updated and should make it easier to view, react and comment on community pictures.  If you haven’t started a showcase yet, upload now and start your collection! 

Thank you to all who provided valuable feedback and insights into the new design and layout recently launched.  We are excited to announce a new feature release to the platform based on your comments. As promised, we have introduced a new “popular posts” quick link from the menu bar that will help you access the active & trending topics faster, within one click. We hope you like it!

For those of you who like to follow certain topics, we have also introduced a new quick link within your profile drop down menu.  This will help you quickly access and sort between your favorite discussions. We hope this makes your experience a little easier and more personalized.  

We have also included some bug fixes and improved readability in a few areas to increase your enjoyment of the community.  We look forward to delivering more improvements in the coming weeks and appreciate your ongoing participation.

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