Introduction
Greetings, one and all, and welcome to the newest edition of the SimHQ Forums.
As most of you know, we have done a major software upgrade, much needed and overdue. With ten years of history and over 2.1 million (yes, that’s 2,100,000) posts, it was a big job. We were not happy to have the boards offline for four days and then overnight, but it could have been much more than that and actually as things have worked out, it went well.
As you no doubt have noticed, there have been a lot of changes: Small, medium, big, some not even apparent at first glance. For example, the main page looks almost exactly like the old one. That’s on purpose, we wanted to have a sense of continuity there.
The forums, whoa, different! And during this past week since the new boards came back online, we have worked on tweaking and changing settings, getting the software developers to do a few things, listening to all your observations and suggestions, and doing what we could do to make this a site that everyone can feel comfortable in.
Well, almost everyone…
Not a unique observation from me, but change is almost always difficult. Even if things work pretty much the same, if they look different, it can be unsettling. You’re used to 10 point font and you get 9 you go, “whoa, I don’t like that!”, if a color scheme changes, it throws you off. And the difference is apparent, because it’s only been (as of this writing) FIVE DAYS.
I get that, but my guess is that after a month, you won’t even notice, or remember, what the old board used to look like (unless you view one of the historic images of the forum) or what they behaved like, and further, you will have become accustomed to all the new features and opportunity of this board and you’ll get to like it. A lot.
The Staff and I, even “guod”, have spent a lot of time this past week making note of your comments, suggestions, gripes, complaints, and yes, congratulatory posts. We thank you for all of them. Where we could make revisions to suit what the majority seemed to want, we did, and we will continue to do so. We cannot ever please everybody, and we’d go even more nuts than we already are if we tried. But rest assured, the tweaking process is continuing.
What I want to do here is give you a little primer on the new, different and in some cases, very powerful features of our new UBBThreads™ software. Maybe, like me, you’ll have little light bulbs go off as you say to yourself,“Aha! So that’s how you do that!” Kinda like digging for little gold nuggets.
This is a new product having only been available for a few months, but still achieving two minor updates. When deciding on the successor to our previous board, UBB Classic, we wanted to stay with UBB if at all possible so it would handle the transfer of the huge volume of posts the most efficiently. We just did not want members to be required to log into two different forums.
So lets take a look.
