New Stuff in the April 5 Update to the Forum Software

[iacas]

Show Subscribed State

This is a pretty straight-forward change to show whether or not you are subscribed to something. For example, previously, if you went to a thread you were already subscribed to, we didn't show any indication of that. With this change, you will get an immediate visual indicator after subscribing to a piece of content, and when you come back to it, we'll show the same indicator.

Once you are subscribed, you can click the link to change the subscription frequency, or unsubscribe (previously, you had to go to the Edit Subscriptions page to unsubscribe).

New Immediate Notification Emails

We'll be making improvements to our email notifications over the next few months. First up are our immediate notification emails. We've made a few improvements that are representative of some of the improvements we'll be making to our other emails:

• Quotes look like quotes in the email notification
• Clear places for you to click
• Buttons no longer use images, so they look fine if the email app doesn't load images
• General formatting cleanups

Here is the same email, as rendered by an outdated email client (Outlook 2003)

Uncategorized Albums on Galleries Portal

We now show uncategorized albums on the image galleries portal page. Previously, we were only showing albums that had been placed into a category.

Tweak to Jump to First Unread Post

This is a very subtle tweak, but I thought it better to mention it anyway.

We have several links on the site that jump to the "first unread post" in a thread. This change affects what those links do if you've never read that thread before. Previously, if you clicked to go to the first unread post in a thread you had never read before, it would open the first page, and then the page would jump down to the first post. Instead, we've changed these links so the just open the thread normally, on the first page.

We believe this is more intuitive for users, as it gives the context that indicates that they're starting this thread from the beginning. Before, when the thread jumped, it was really hard to tell that you were in fact starting from the beginning. Of course, the behavior for threads you've already read is unchanged.

Thread/PM Functionality when JavaScript is Disabled

We've been working to improve the general reliability of our site. One of the areas we've been working on is to make sure that core functionality still works when Javascript is broken or disabled. For this release, we've made sure that these functions work in the no-Javascript condition:

• Creating threads
• Replying to threads
• Creating personal messages
• Replying to personal messages