Despite the title of this post this is more than just a redesign, we’ve both switched from a shared website host to a new dedicated server and migrated to a new much more advanced piece of forum software. I’ve also taken the time to retype a lot of the text on this website and made some other changes so you should have a look around.
What You Need to Know
Reset your Password to Log In
Like almost all modern websites we only store an encrypted hash of your password in our database, as a result of this passwords were not migrated along with everything else so require you to reset your password to access a previously created account. You can do this by going to Log In > I forgot my password which is located on the header at the top of this page.
Review Month
For the next month of so we will be taking feedback on the changes to this website and adjusting things accordingly. Nothing is set in stone so don’t get too used to the changes yet, we may decide that we want to scrap everything and go back to the previous website or even that the dark colour scheme isn’t suiting us as much as perhaps a rust brown and salmon pink one would 
.
Don’t like something on the website or just want to give some general feedback? You can just post it in reply to this topic, or in the Site Feedback area if it’s something that might require a whole topic to itself.
What’s New
A New Dark Theme
In the past when I’ve asked which would be preferred a dark theme or a light one the dark one has almost always been the choice. This update brings a new dark website theme to go along with the change of layout.
Drag and Drop Image Uploading
If you wanted to put an image in a post on the old forum you would have to go thorough the tedious process of uploading said image to an image host like www.imgur.com then selecting add an image and using the www.imgur.com link. Now you can just drag and drop the image from your computer (or another web page) to the edit window and it will be uploaded and inserted into the post, all automatically.
Better Mobile Support
With the previous website update we claimed that we had support for mobile phone size screens, and we did… it just wasn’t very good support. With this new update we have a new separate layout optimised for small screens which the site will automatically switch to on a phone.
Trust Levels and Badges
This update brings a whole array of badges to the community, some which will be automatically awarded and some manually. For example below you can see the First Like badge which will be awarded when you like a post for the first time.
With these badges also comes trust levels, awarded like badges trust levels will grant certain benefits when you get them, like the Regular trust level which will allow you access to the Lounge, an area for regulars only as well as a number of other things.
Mentions
This is one of the smaller new features but also one of the most important, mentions. Mentioning someone involved typing @ followed by there user name (don’t worry about remembering people’s full names once you have typed a few characters the website will automatically search and display a list of users starting with those characters). When a user is mentioned they get a notification and a link to the post.
Pretty cool, don’t you think @c4192857 and @XMB?
Better PM System
The private message system works a lot more like a mini forum post than the previous one did. Each message can have multiple participants and every related message is shown on one page. This will make it a huge amount easier for me to see and respond to private messages than it was before, so I aim to respond to all messages on this new site within a few hours instead of days.
Lots of Other Things
As I mentioned this new forum is a huge amount more advanced and modern than the previous one. There are almost too many new things to mention so I will stick with the ones above for now and let people explore the rest.
Upcoming Features
Teamspeak Intergration
One of the current benefits of being registered on this website is gaining Member rank on our Teamspeak server (which allows you to poke other users, set an avatar and just generally be recognized as a member of the community). Currently this requires you to sign up here then contact a member of staff who will grant you the Member rank, soon this will be done via redeemable codes which grant you Member rank.
Status Page
We currently host quite a few servers which very few members of the community know about, or can learn about without searching through hundreds of posts. To remedy this we have plans to create a page which will show all servers that we are currently running and their current status (Online, Offline, Restarting, Etc).
Teamspeak Bot
If you visited the Teamspeak a few months ago you may have noticed the ServerBot which performed a number of helpful functions. Until recently it has been offline for improvement, with this website update expect the ServerBot to return very soon.
Feedback and New Members
As I’ve mentioned above for the next month or so we will be taking and responding to any and all helpful feedback on the new website, don’t like something? tell us.
If this is your first time here (from our Teamspeak for example) then I invite you to register and introduce yourself to the community. In comparison to the Teamspeak our forum has been a lot more of a useful but silent wiki like place for information, we hope that this update will attract a few more people and help it become more than that.