Planned Downtime 2pm to 6pm CST on 01/26/2013

General
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This is a big heads up. The board will be going offline at 2:00pm on the 26th for a major software update. In theory, the board should actually only be offline for about an hour, but a four hour window is being scheduled to be on the safe side due to the nature of the upgrade.

If you’re currently using the default theme, you won’t notice too many changes when the board comes back up, but if you’re using one of the other themes your theme will be reset to the default. Initially only the default SMF themes will be available, but that is something that will hopefully be rectified fairly quickly :slight_smile:

Some of the notable changes that you can expect with the upgrade:

Member Groups you can choose to join. If you’ve been around long enough, you probably remember having these before. You will probably even recognize the initial set of groups :slight_smile:

No more post size limits, something story posters will appreciate

A donate button in the menu bar: This will make it easy for you to submit one-off donations any time.

Related: Paid subscriptions. These are basically automatically recurring donations. They won’t do any thing special right now, but may later :slight_smile:

Open registrations. Yes, email validation will still be required, but no more approvals will be necessary. This is because the new version supports having posts by new members hidden until a certain number of posts have been approved by an admin or moderator. This should help get fresh blood in here :slight_smile:

Warning system: Hopefully you won’t see this feature in action, but it’s a way to handle unruly members without outright banning them.

Search Engine Tracking: Fun one. This will make the Who’s Online who what search engines are on the board instead of seeing dozens of “Guests”

Hidden email addresses: All users will have their address hidden by default after the upgrade. If you choose to display it publicly it will still be hidden from from anyone not logged in, including search engines.

One additional feature: Not technically part of the upgrade, but the Tapatalk app is going to be officially supported after the upgrade that up until now has only been functional because it was installed manually by Stefan a long time ago and I’ve just kept it running because it’s actually useful to me. There are quite a few people currently using the semi-broken installation of it on both Android and iOS devices.

There is an extension for Chrome that uses Tapatalk to notify of new private messages and replies to topics you’re subscribed to.

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If you have any questions, please post them here and I’ll do my best to answer them ASAP.

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Re: Planned Downtime 2pm to 6pm CST on 01/26/2013

Not bad! Very snazzy! It’ll take me a while to get used to EVERYTHING and I have questions regarding" Teams". But that’s because I wasn’t a member when there were teams. Hmmm……

Edit: I think I meant to say “Member groups”. There, that sounds better! ;D

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Planned Downtime 2pm to 6pm CST on 01/26/2013

The team page is just the list of mods and admins. :slight_smile:

One thing that’s not active yet is the Paid Subscriptions that auto-renew. There’s some issues on the PayPal end that need to be corrected first.

There’s a couple of other minor cosmetic changes that need to be made, but I’ll be making those changes when other themes start getting installed because it’ll save time to do them then :slight_smile:

Edit: you edited while I was typing.

The member groups are the post count based groups, like Toddler, and like Spam Analysis (the group that lets me handle the spam stuff). The 3 requestable groups basically are just like the default group all members are in except they grant access to the LG, Video Games, and Religion forums. They’ve always been there, just not obviously so :slight_smile:

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