New Forum Features.

A brief explanation of some of the new features to be found now that we've upgraded to VBulletin 3.7.

As you can see, we've somewhat changed the look of the site after just about finishing a tremendous amount of tidying up and sorting out of the infrastructure over the last 6 months, but the changes aren't just cosmetic, a few extra features also come with the new package.

User Profiles: This is perhaps the most obvious change, they now show a bit more information. They also have a public message box for leaving notes to the user, and the facility to upload pictures direct to your profile. If you potter around your own profile by clicking on your name you'll see a few links to some other new features.

Social Groups: It's now possible for any member to set up a 'Social Group', any topic or theme you like, closed 'invite only' or public. Pictures can be uploaded to the group's individual gallery.

Friendships: Not unlike the old 'buddy' system, or Facebook (if you're familiar with that) you can now mark people as 'friends'. The more practical side of this is that they will then be added to your 'Contact List' as found on the profile or the 'Quick Links' drop-down menu. This should make it a smoother process sending PMs to people you regularly communicate with.

Tagging: You'll notice that at the bottom of each thread there's now a space for 'tags'.
For those not au fait with You-tube etc. these are a means of facilitating searching and grouping of particular themes. Anyone may add two tags to any thread (eg. '1940', 'POW', 'RAF' 'British Vehicles', 'Grenadier guards' etc.), the thread starter can add five, eventually, when more threads have these tags it should be a lot easier to follow those themes throughout the site, stopping perhaps just an interesting aside in one thread from dropping into obscurity as long as it has an appropriate tag. Use any term you like to gather threads that you may want to return to.

There's a few more bits and pieces but the above seem the core changes to me.
Hope that makes sense and if anything doesn't seem clear don't hesitate to ask questions.

Whether we can actually answer 'em is a different matter...

Cheers,
Adam.

 

I can't make friends

I've heard that...

It may just be you mate, seems to be working ok for others.
I've sent a friend request, and will have a look with the Test Profile to see what happens when I use that.

Edit: Aha, Mac-ism. I imagine Vbulletin will catch up with any issues like that soon.

 

Added a link to the Groups on the portal (left hand side, second box down) & fixed the drop down 'quick links' there, some of which had died in the re-skinning.

Cheers,
Adam.