More site tweaks

You may now notice that the four new forums that were rolled out just on a week ago are back. This time they are working flawlessly and I hope they will come to benefit members as the original three did. There are now seven forums all up.

I have also got around to removing the old sign-in page. For a long time now, signing in has been a matter of filling in the form at the top of the sidebar. It is automatically hidden by the site once you have successfully logged in and re-appears automatically if you either log out or your session expires. With this form in the sidebar, the older login page was no longer needed.

Some minor visual changes have taken place, some too minor to mention though a few of these are that there is an arrow icon next to the links on the forum home page - these allow the links to each forum to stand out more without having to alter the colour or font type for these links. You will notice that in each forum there is a third column (actually a new first column) which currently has nothing in it apart from blank space. This column will soon be used to house icons that indicate things like when new posts have been made, and if a thread has been locked or not or made sticky, meaning that it would be stuck at the top of the list all the time. These are features found on most forum software distributions and will serve us well once they are introduced here.

I've detailed some other inclusions such as pagination of the thread lists and extra smileys (emoticons) and how to go about using them in the Forum Guidelines, which should be read in full at least once every three months by members so they remain familiar with updates and changes.

I have also made a big change to the front page forum (the forum you are on right now). The replies section now closely mimics that in the other forums and the features you find there are now also here too. This enhances the viewing and participation experience for members and also takes away the cheap-looking weblog feel that existed before.

The glossary is also back. For some reason I didn't link to it when I last replaced the website's template. It is a handy resource so it is back and a link to it is in the sidebar.

Vintage Radio is fast approaching the 500-member club and the more people that become members, the more incentive that I have to add more content and improve the useability of the forums.

Written at 09:06 on 19 April 2009 by Brad.

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