Complete list of forum modifications

[James]

Here's a complete list of changes made to the forum

As of 4/28/08

- Inline Spam Management
Works very similar to how most blogs work nowadays. Whenever you make a post it's submitted to Akismet against their spam filters. This works wonders on blogs so it will hopefully cut down on the lamers you troll forums and the automated posting bots. (This turns off after you have so many posts, obviously I'm not disclosing what that number is set to but once you've been around for little while your posts don't get scanned)

- Thread Tagging
Underneath each thread/post editor window you'll see a box for Tags. This is something I'd like everyone to try an use as it will help our search engine ranking (which sucks right now). The concept is pretty simply, think of how you might use google. If you make a post titled "Kellie returns home" you might tag the thread with the keywords (kellie pickler, albemarle, nashville) something like that. It's also a way to help organize posts so that you can later use those keywords to find all posts tagged with a particular one (ie: using the tag "Awards" would return you all threads related to awards that were tagged as such).

- Thread Prefixes
This one I'm been testing in the CF Technical Support forums and I will turn it on here soon. Basically it allows a prefix to be added to a thread title (think Spoilers).

- Reciprocal Friendships Between Users
As part of our new social networking system, users can now request that people on their buddy list confirm their friendship, after which time a person's list of confirmed friends will be viewable to other users.

- Public Messaging
While private messages between users have been around forever the public messaging system, allows users to communicate publicly via their profile pages.

- User Picture Galleries
You can now upload pictures to a personal album associated with your account. These can be used in post, profiles, etc.

- User-Created Social Groups
To further social cohesion between users and to encourage people to make friends, we now include a facility to allow users to create their own social/interest groups. (This replaced the club threads in The Club House).

- New Member Profile Page
The new page presents information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface.

Individual profile field categories can be displayed alone in blocks in the right column, in addition to appearing by default in the 'About Me' tab.

- Member Customization of Profile Page
Allows users to alter fonts, colors, background and borders etc. of their profile page in order to create a more personalized look. The administrator can lock-down customization permissions, in order to prevent the personalized pages being made too offensively awful by aesthetically challenged members... nobody wants to see some of those really ugly MySpace pages on your Kellie Fans profiles!

- Inline Editing of Profile Field Values
The 'About Me' tab of each member's profile page has edit controls, allowing them to quickly change values without leaving their profile page.

- Attachment Viewing Lightbox
Clicking on an attached image will now open a lightbox rather than open a new window, with the image scaled to fit the browser viewport. A click on the image in the lightbox will open it in a new window as before.

- Navbar Notices
Custom notifications that will appear underneath the navbar when visiting users fulfill specified criteria. This is neat because it allows for more effective communication to all members.

[James]

Extra Modifications (these extend functionality and may come and go over time)

- RSS Feeds
These have always been there but for those that like to use email notifications to keep up with posts, this is much easier on the servers. Each forum can be selected and tracked in a news reader. The master list can be found using the orange RSS button at the bottom of every page.

- ImageShack & PhotoBucket Uploads
If for whatever reason you don't want to use the inline attachment system to add photos to your posts, you can now upload directly to Imageshack or Photobucket from within the post editor (of course, you'll need accounts with them first).

- Embedded Video
I've added a mod that make embedding video in a post pretty easy. It supports virtually all the tier 1 and tier 2 video sites out there. Posting a video is easy, for YouTube simply copy the video url (Not the Embedding code although that may work too). Typically this would be the url you'd send in an email.

http://www.domain.com/watch?v=-nRGC720Qak"]

In the example replace domain.com with youtube.com

YouTube - Kellie Pickler-I Wonder

- Post Thanks You
Each post has a "Thanks" button. This is intended to cut down the number of posts that say things like "Thanks for posting". If you want to thank someone for a post please use the Thanks button.

- Usernames
Funky characters in usernames are now restricted. The only allowable character is an _. I know some of you like to make really weird names but those characters end up preventing other things like your profiles, blogs, etc from working properly. If you have one of these username, you can contact us and we'll arrange to change it for you. It's not mandatory but if your having problems with profile association that is the only way to fix it.

- Force Users To Read A Thread
This won't get used very often but occasionally there is need to make sure everyone reads a particular post (ie: policy changes). I now have the ability to force everyone to read a particular thread before they're allowed to do anything else on the board. Just so you know.