On Saturday, August 17th, at 9:00 a.m. CST, there will be scheduled downtime as we upgrade our forum software. The expected downtime is 2-3 hours. The time of the upgrade is subject to change; if the times change, a follow-up announcement will be posted here. Announcements will also be posted on our facebook and twitter pages. We will be upgrading the software that powers www.WritingForums.org from vBulletin to Xenforo. We believe this upgrade is best for the long-term growth and stability of our community. With this upgrade you can expect many new features and a cleaner, smoother, and more dynamic design. There will be a slight learning curve, but I'm confident that after a few weeks you'll wonder how we ever existed before this new version. WF 4.0, as I call it, will rejuvinate our community. I intend to post daily explanations highlighting specific new improvements once we've made the transition. Though most data will be preserved, if you have Private Messages or Album Photos that you don't want to risk losing, please take a backup by saving them to your computer. Reputation, reputation comments, and blog comments may also be lost. I'm both excited and confident about this forum upgrade. Stayed tuned - great things are in WF's future.
Sorry for the downtime: I've upgraded the software, blogs, and imported the albums. We now have a gallery with many more features and privacy settings. Additionally, if you were/are in the Supporter membergroup, please PM me.
Regarding the Writing Workshop: I apologize for the issue of being unable to post new threads. I think I have it sorted out. When you log in (or possibly when you make one new post) you should be upgraded from New Member to Member and be allowed to post (if you meet the review requirements) in the workshop. For the next few days, the threshold will be one review to make a workshop thread. This is because some of you have been posting reviews over the past few days and they weren't counting towards your quota limit. In a few days I'll re-impliment the quota rule. Additionally with the workshop, posts make in your own thread don't count towards review requirements, and only the first post in a thread will count.
I've moved the posts in this thread to a thread in the suggestions/support area. Please keep discussion of the upgrade to one of the threads there - this thread will serve as a place to announce updates and fixes from issues brought by the upgrade.
We just upgraded the blogs and gallery. New features/tweaks - Blogs: You can now Watch Blogs (follow blogs of specific members) Edit history: you can now see the edit history of your own blogs entry and comments Gallery: Added ability to click a position on a map while editing album/photo's location Indicator if photo is an animated gif Overlay feature - Images are now displayed in overlays Added edit location and privacy link to overlay Bug fixes Added watch/unwatch link to photo/album view (if you like/comment/or add a photo, you automatically watch the photo/album Better image integration with Twitter -- Also have rewritten the forum urls to look better and act more structured.
