Hello everyone,

The forums were updated today (April 6, 2010) to fix some long-standing bugs, add a few new features, and make some minor changes.  The change log is as follows:

Note: If you notice any of the below features are not available or not working properly, please do a hard refresh (hold CTRL and press F5) to retrieve the latest javascript and css files.

1. "Flattened forums" option now available.

The flattened forums option is simply another way of viewing the forums.  The layout and design won't change, but what posts you see will.  What it does is "flatten" all of the posts in a specific forum so that it includes the posts in all of its sub-forums.  For example, the Stardock Games forum on the ImpulseDriven.com would include all of the posts in its sub-forums, such as Indie Games, Stardock Games, and Ubisoft Games.

This means that when you click on a forum now (with this option enabled), it will display many more posts than usual, and you can "dig deeper" into more specific topics by clicking on sub-forums.

You can turn this option on and try it for yourself by going to the My Account Options page.

2. Built-in spellchecker in the editors.  

There is now a spellchecker icon in the new post/reply editor, which will scan your content and highlight mis-spelled items, as well as provide proper spelling options.

After you type out your post, click on the spellchecker icon and it will scan the contents of the post and highlight mis-spelled words.  Left clicking on any mis-spelled word will provide a small popup with suggestions for the mis-spelled word.

The regular Firefox spellchecker is still a bit finicky about how it wants to work in the editor, so you may find that sometimes it works, and other times it doesn't.

3. Auto-resizing editor.

This feature may be more annoying than useful, so if enough of you find it annoying I'll disable it.  Basically, it auto-resizes the editor (vertically) when writing long posts.  

4. Preview button in editor.

This allows you to preview your post before submitting to see what it looks like.  For those of you who do a lot of formatting to your posts, this will help to save a lot of time without having to edit and re-edit to get it just right.

5. Many other minor additions, changes, and bug fixes.

These include the following:

Temporary removal of RSS feed icons in the forum listings.  This is because RSS feeds are not working properly and we are looking into a new solution for them.  We are thinking of removing RSS support for all forums except for specific ones that are important (such as Impulse Announcements or Elemental Dev Journals).  This will reduce the overhead of having these RSS feeds, will make implementing them much easier, and will provide more up-time for these feeds as we don't have to manage hundreds of different feeds.

Your password is now required if you try to change your username or existing password in your My Accounts page.

A "Return to Top" link was added at the bottom of every page (just above the timestamp) to quickly return to the top of the page.

Removed the custom right click menu on the editor, so it now uses the browser's default right click menu.

Bug fixes, karma fixes, CSS fixes, etc.

Note: If you notice any of the above features are not available or not working properly, please do a hard refresh (hold CTRL and press F5) to retrieve the latest javascript and css files.

As always, if you notice any bugs or problems, please let me know by posting in the Forum Issues forum or contacting me via PM.

Bara