Forum Upgraded - New Features!

Dear IL'ites,

We are very happy to announce an interesting feature upgrade to our community. There are a lot of new things to get excited about. In a nutshell, following are the 4 major feature enhancements

1. Picture Albums
2. Enhanced Profiles
3. Easy Picture Attachments
4. Friends & Contacts System






Picture Albums

• You can now upload your pictures as separate albums in IL. Earlier you can only upload pictures in the posts.
• You can make your albums viewable by everyone or only by your contacts/friends. (Private Album - a feature most requested by many members)
• You can now hot link pictures from your album into your posts.

Enhanced Profiles

• User profile page now has a tabbed structure for neat organization
  • An "About Me" tab that contains information about you. You can now update your information in the “About Me” tab without leaving your profile page (earlier you need to go to User CP to update your profile information)
  • "Statistics" tab to show your post count, list your recent posts and threads, activity information and referrals.
  • "Friends" tab to list your friends within IL
  • "Contact Info" tab gives the web address for your profile in IL and also some ways to contact you (e.g. private messages, if you have the facility)
  • "Moderator Comments" - Greeters, Moderators, Local Champions and Administrators now have a way to communicate with new members without having to always do it in the public forum.
• Visitor tracking on profile pages lists the members who recently visited your profile page.
• Albums that list all the public albums that you have uploaded in IL.
• Senior Members can customize their profile (more on this soon)
• Your name is now clickable taking you to your profile

Easy Attachments

• Attachments now open within the same window dimming the background (lightbox). You can close the lightbox and return to the main content. It is very user friendly compared to opening a separate window.
• Automatic resizing of picture attachments. If the picture you are trying to upload is bigger than the allowed file size or pixel dimensions, the system automatically resizes to the allowed limit. Earlier it gave an upload failed error message.
• Picture attachments now have a bigger thumbnail size and hence you don't have to open attachments in most cases.
• Inline pictures - pictures can now be inserted in between the message to better help with the flow of your post instead of always having it at the end of the post. Refer this post as a sample!!
• No external hot linking - Because of the above changes, we are disabling the ability for members to hotlink pictures from external sites like photobucket, flickr etc.

Friends & Contacts System

• You can have you own set of Friends and Contacts within our community. Contacts are someone you add to your list of contacts (without needing an approval from the other person). Friends are reciprocal, whereby the other person agrees to be your friend.
• You can share your private albums ONLY to your "Contacts", allowing for better privacy. BTW, your Friends automatically qualify to be your Contacts and enjoy the privilege of viewing your private albums.
• Please be careful as to who you add as contact/friend because several of your privacy settings depend on this.

Finally, a big thank you to our Super Moderator Laxmi, who managed a full 32 hours with 4 hours of sleep inbetween! Needless to say the several days preparing for the upgrade! We don't sing her praises enough.

Please ask your questions, comments and feedback about the August forum upgrade. I am closing this thread.