We are planning on upgrading the forums this coming Sunday 28th July. This is a major upgrade and the forums will be unavailable for several hours.
When they do come back online they will initially be in a degraded state (ie. search functions/new posts/gallery etc. will not be fully functional. These areas take several hours to rebuild and will gradually become available over the following hours)
There will almost certainly be the inevitable teething problems we get when the new software and server needs tuned to handle the high load which we experience from time to time on this site – please be patient.
Why Upgrade?
The forum software we run (Xenforo 1.x) is no longer supported with the exception of security updates which will also end later this year. It is essential that we move to Xenforo 2.x to ensure continuity of the forums.
What will change?
We are trying to keep the changes to a minimum, particularly with the appearance and layout of the forum. The forums won’t look identical to they do now, but hopefully they will be familiar to everyone.
Enhancements/Improvements
- As well as the existing colour scheme of dark text on a light background, we will be introducing an often requested optional dark version of the forums with a black/grey background there will be an easy method of switching between the two colour schemes.
- The problem where hovering over threads using a touch-screen Windows laptop does not display the thread preview “tooltip” is fixed.
- Notifications (so you can get an app-type alert on your phone/pc even when not directly browsing the forums) are supported for Windows/Android/Linux devices. These are fully configurable so you can configure which events you want to receive notifications for. Unfortunately for technical reasons (ie. Apple won’t let you!) they will not work with iOS or Safari.
- ‘URL Unfurling’ – when you post a link to another website, the forum will attempt to retrieve a snippet from that website and display it in your post.
- Bookmarking – you can now bookmark posts that you may want to revisit later.
There are plenty more minor enhancements that we will leave you to find, as well as huge changes behind the scenes which make it easier for us to maintain the site going forward.
