New Forum Features and Updates

[Steve]

Forum Software Upgraded to vBulletin 3.7

Other than a slight change in the theme of the forum, most of you probably didn't notice the new features that are included in the latest update of the forum software (vBulletin 3.7). Time will tell how useful these new features are.

Besides some new administrative features that help manage the forum, the following features are new:

Thread Tagging - As a new way to facilitate searching and grouping of threads, it is now possible for you to add tags to threads you post or read. Tags can be added when creating a new thread, or to an existing thread. When you click on these tags, you will not only find all threads that have the same tag as the one clicked, but you will also contribute to the building of a search tag cloud, which gives other users a quick guide as to what has been searched for recently and most frequently.

Thread Prefixes - Threads can now have prefixes to their titles. Thread prefixes are divided into groups, allowing different prefixes to be available in different forums. So far I added the following to start: Tour Announcement, Trip Report, For Sale, Wanted, and Free. If you have any suggestions for additional prefixes, please let me know.

Reciprocal Friendships Between Users - As part of a new social networking system, users can now request that people on their buddy list confirm their friendship, after which time a person's list of confirmed friends will be viewable to other users.

Public Messaging - While private messages between users have been in vBulletin since version 2.0, vBulletin 3.7 introduces the public messaging system, allowing users to communicate publicly via their profile pages.

User-Created Social Groups - To further social cohesion between users and to encourage people to make friends, vBulletin now includes a facility to allow users to create their own social/interest groups. These groups are enhanced by having their own public messaging system.

New Member Profile Page - In order to accommodate all the new features in vBulletin 3.7, the member profile page has been completely redesigned from the ground up. The new page presents information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface. Individual profile field categories can be displayed alone in blocks in the right column, in addition to appearing by default in the 'About Me' tab.

Member Customization of Profile Page - There is now a profile page customization tool, which allows you to alter fonts, colors, and borders etc. of your profile page in order to create a more personalized look.

Inline Editing of Profile Field Values - The 'About Me' tab of your profile page has edit controls, allowing you to quickly change values without leaving your profile page.

New Human Verification Systems - In addition to the image verification system available in previous versions of vBulletin, 3.7 introduces the means to use the popular RECAPTCHA™ system to reduce the amount of spam to the forums.

Social Bookmarking of Threads - At the bottom of each thread, there is a list of several popular social bookmarking sites (Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google to begin with). If you have an account set with one of the social bookmarking sites, it's as simple as selecting the link to add the forum page to your personal bookmarks. I encourage you to use this feature.

Plus there are many more features not even listed here.

If you have any questions on these new features, please refer to the forum FAQs. If your question is not answered there, post up your question and I'll try to find an answer for you.

Search Engine Optimization

An additional change, unrelated to the vBulletin 3.7 update is the addition of a Search Engine Optimization plugin by vBSEO.

With this plugin, the primary change you will notice is that the URLs are formatted like a html document (example: /trip-planning/9984-scouting-whiskey-dick-may-16-2008-friday.html vs. the old method (example: /showthread.php?t=9984). This update in addition to other features will hopefully provide a little better ranking in the search engines.

Also, to better rank in the search engines, I changed the structure of the primary URL to the forum. The new URL for the forum is pnwadventures.com/forum (the old was forum.pnwadventures.com). With the old format, the search engines treated the blog and forum as two separate sites. This change will combine all of the content into one main site. If you have any problems login into the site or receive "server busy" error messages, try logging in with the new format. Be sure to update your bookmarks.

Hopefully all these changes will make for a better experience for you. Again, let me know if you have any questions about these changes.

Steve