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[Kayla]

We like to think that Surmunity is one of the best web hosting forums out there. Through our efforts to organize it in the best possible way and through hearing your input, these are the things we have added or changed so far in 2008.

• [Answered] Threads - As we look through the forum to make sure everyone is helped, we can mark threads that are "done" with this plugin. This saves a lot of time.

• Tutorial Boards - A lot of forums have these sections but the problem is : they're dead. Our goal is to have new and fresh content every day for every type of user, and on many different hosting and design topics.

• Report Concerns Section - In the Shared, Reseller and Private Hosting boards, we have added a section to the top of each page. This way if there is a server issue that you notice we can keep those threads in one place and keep "general" questions in the main board. It's just an extra step to make sure everything is looked at quickly.

The future!

Later in this year vBulletin version 3.7 should be out. This is really exciting because of these reasons:

• Tags - You'll be able to add tags to your threads (such as: php, graphics, uploading, backups) so that we can begin to see where most questions come up in an even easier way. So far there have only been third-party plugins to add tags but with the new version of vBulletin it becomes a standard feature.

• Better spam management - Even though we found a plugin to completely prevent bots from registering, occasionally real humans will register and post bogus threads. We try to delete these as fast as possible but the new vBulletin will have even better tools for dealing with this growing problem. vBulletin also realizes this and made their own tool for getting rid of "spamming humans" :P

• Prefixes - As with the current [Answered] plugin that we use, vBulletin 3.7 will have the ability to set many prefixes so that the topics of threads can be easily identified. So this is more added organization.

• Public messaging - This is my own favorite feature: the ability to leave messages on each other's profile pages. Could be fun.

• Groups - Another really fun thing.. oh, I can't wait to see what groups we'll have.

• So with all of this comes... the new profile pages which look like this:

It's kind of funny how many of things we felt the forum needed are already known issues at the vB offices. Very wonderful if you ask me - I'm a vB fan for life. When 3.7 comes out of beta we will install it right away. As announced yesterday at the vB forums,

"Progress towards vBulletin 3.7.0 becoming our 'stable' version and replacing 3.6.x is going well, and the time has come to put out our second release candidate version."

So really I can't wait for this to become stable. I am sure it will allow us to better organize how we help everyone here and allow the community to grow even larger.

Thank you for reading and for being a part of this community!

Discuss this thread here if you would like:
[Discuss] 2008 Summary of (Forum) Changes