November 6 Updates Coming to The Sand Trap! Including Quote Notifications

[iacas]

Happy November!  Quick PSA, for those of you in the US, don't forget that day light savings ends on Sunday.  Roll those clocks back and get an extra hour of sleep.

Now onto the release notes.  Next week's release is deep in QA now.  We're scheduled to release on Tuesday, Nov. 5 but please bear with us if that is pushed back a day or two. We'll update on Monday for when you can expect all the following goodness on your site.

Quote Notifications Are Here!

For a long time we've all wanted a way to know when someone responded to us in the forums. @mentions were a helpful step in that, and Quote Notifications are part 2 of this story.

From now on, when someone quotes your post, you'll receive a notification like this one via email:

Don't want to receive these? Turn them off via this handy user preference:

You won't get duplicate emails. If you're subscribed to immediate notifications on a thread, and someone quotes you in a post there, you will NOT get both the quote notification and the immediate subscription notification. In this case you will receive only the quote notification. Similarly, if they quote and @mention you, all in a thread you're subscribed to, you WON'T get three emails. In this case, you'll only get the @mention email (because that one seems the most important.

We realize that email isn't always the ideal way to keep up with lots of site updates. We are working on an onsite Notifications Center that will give you an onsite listing of all the @mentions and quotes you've been the subject of, in addition to other helpful alerts. That's a sizable project and is going to take more time. For the moment, quote notifications and @mentions are focused around using email to alert members and re-engage them when they may be off the site.

Change your user preferences more easily.

This release is giving some major love to the user account details section of your profile.

Quickly access to some of the most important things related to you - your profile, your posts, threads you started, editing your signature, changing your avatar, editing your preferences, and logging out.

The first three (and logging out) are pretty self explanatory.  For the "Edit My Signature" button, if you click that from the drop down, no matter where you are, you'll invoke the signature editor dialog.  For the "Change My Avatar" button, you guessed it - you invoke the image uploader for your avatar, no matter where you are.  Last, there's the Preferences link.

The new preferences pages gives you an easier way to change your personal experience and settings. While the preferences are all the same (with a few wording updates to clarify them), we've broken them out into a few different pages.  The Preferences page includes all of your site wide, forum, and subscription preferences.  The subscription preferences have been consolidated down from their former split on the Account Details and Subscription pages.  If your site has Facebook Connect enabled, you'll now see this broken onto a separate tab under the Preferences panel.  My Info includes your email, gender, and timezone.  And last but not least, we have separate areas for changing your password and managing your block list.

Delete your signature at will.

So you have a signature that you want to get rid of.  Prior to this release, if you deleted all the content out of your signature, you'd get a sad error that said something about not being able to preview an empty signature body.

We're changing two things in this release.  First, you'll be able to open the editor, delete all the content, and save an empty signature, which will remove your signature entirely (this will effect both rich text and BB code).  We're also adding a specific control to remove your signature next to the "Edit Signature" button on your profile:

Bugs and minor tweaks

• 14339 - Social group leaders will be able to send PMs to group via hotkey enter
• 14341 - Clicking on a related image from a tag page now takes you to the single image view in the tag album, rather than the user's album
• 14369 - Canceling out of an article edit without making changes will not fire the save warning.
• 4340 - Character limits for featured content titles and descriptions will now be displayed.
• 14130 - More work to prevent all double posts.
• 13987 - Vimeo embedded videos will behave appropriately.
• 14281 - Redundant heading on profile page (" 's Community Profile") is being removed.
• 14289 - Clicking "Forum Read" icon in subforum module will not mark threads read.
• 14340 - Tag albums can be sorted by recency or thumbs-up.
• 14380 - Emails footers have been updated with new language about the Preferences page.
• 14397 - Smiley embeds will not appear as HTML when quoted via Tapatalk.
• 14396 - Replying to a post in IE8 with the BB Code editor will behave as expected on submit.

[boogielicious]

Looking forward to it.

[mvmac]

Good stuff

[iacas]

Quoting this image in case you wish to turn off quote notifications. I renamed the thread too.