Here are a list of changes which will affect all members:
1) Usernames will no longer be case sensitive.
2) Karma (optional feature). Each user can have their own karma, which other users can praise or smite a user to increase or decrease the users karma.
3) If a user creates an account with the same username as someone who was deleted, the new user will not be able to edit or delete the older users posts. This will be based on a registration date check versus the time of the posting.
4) For dates, "Yesterday" will also be added in addition to the already existing "Today." Posts may show up as something like "Posted on Yesterday at 12:22 am"
5) All email addresses will have spam protection on them which will help make it so that spam bots will not be able to pick up your email address.
6) Drop down menus are now used to change between different pages for viewing boards and threads. This allows you to specify any page you want, especially useful for boards and threads with many pages.
7) For displaying dates and times, you will now be able to specify 4 different options that will let you control the date and time. These options include am/pm or 24 hour time options, time zone choices, what format to display the date in (e.g. Jan 1, 2000, 01-01-00, etc), and options to reverse the month and day fields.
Signatures will be displayed on the view profile page
9) When a user's email address is changed -- by either an admin, or the user -- a new randomly generated password is sent and emailed to that user.
10) In addition to member groups, users will be able to have their own custom title.
11) You can choose if you want to see people's signatures when reading threads
12) You can opt to not display avatars when reading threads
13) Birthday will become a required field in the profile. As we do not allow users under the age of 13, an age check will be in place which will remove accounts of users under this age.
14) The server times will no longer default to east coast time. Everything will be based off of GMT. All user profiles will be updated accordingly to keep them in the correct time zone.
15) We are introducing a new system to replace the notifications system. Using the bookmarks system, you will be able to bookmark different threads and have quick access to them from your profile screen.
For each bookmark, you can specify whether you would like to receive a PM, an email, or receive no notification when a new post is made in the thread that is bookmarked.
You will only receive notification that a thread has been updated one time until you view the thread again. This means that if 10 people post before you get back to a thread, you still only get notified once. Once you view the thread, you may then receive notifications again.
An option will be available to set what your default notification action should be for threads you bookmark.
For example, you can set your default action to be to PM you. Then any time you bookmark a thread in the future, it will automatically set that bookmark to notify you by PM of any updates.
16) When you want to use a UBBC code, such as bold, you will be able to highlight text from your message and then click on the bold icon. The UBBC tags will be instantly added around the text you highlighted.
17) An option will be available such that people can register for an account but will not be able to use that account until an administrator has approved them (or someone who is given the power to approve accounts).
On the register page, an activation code will appear which the user must type into a text box. This is to prevent people from utilizing scripts to mass register accounts.
18) All users will be able to go into invisible mode. Administrators and Global Moderators will see these users as online with "(invisible)" after their name in the users online area.
19) When a user accesses a page which requires that they be logged in, instead of giving an error message it will display a login box so that the user may login and continue.
20) If someone attempts to login to an account more than 10 times unsuccessfully within a 10 minute period, that user will be banned from the forum for a period of an hour.
21) You will be able to get your password reminder sent to you just by entering your email address -- you won't need to remember your username.
22) When registering you may specify your desired password instead of receiving a random password via email. You will receive an email with an activation code that you must use to activate your account.
Twyrch /|\
