Hey all! As you may have noticed, the Green Home Huddle has undergone some big changes...I'll go over them here:
The Quick and Dirty List
- New view for logged in home page and subscriptions
- Site statistics to see how many users are online as well as indications for which users are online
- Box of "quicklinks" added to the home page for easy navigation to the FAQ and more
- Quicklinks on the product pages to easily get to the description, reviews, and wiki
- New terminology for the Public Profile and the Product Profile
- Revamped message center
Forum Related
- New views for the forums to show logged-in users what's new since their last visit
- Forums can now collapse and be marked as read
- "Wiki stickies" for announcements in the forums
- A "New Posts" page to keep track of all the latest forum activity in chronological order
- Advanced forum search
- A page to see all posts from one user
- Tweaks to the design of the forum threads themselves (including avatar placement, location, display of join dates, and post count) and prettier buttons
- Multi-quote functionality
- Text colors and sizes, etc.
Big Changes
On the new logged in home page, you'll see some changes. First of all, your subscriptions to this...
They're now tabbed, you can see how many forum posts there have been in the last 24 hours, and you can see more (just click the button at the bottom).
At the bottom of the page, above the footer, you can see how many users and guests are online. Around the site (in the forums and on user pages), you'll see a little green dot next to someone's name if they are currently on the site.
Among some of the other little things you might notice, there's a box of "quicklinks" on the home page for handy navigation to the FAQ, the site tour, and the Find Your Friends tool.
On the product page at the top, there are other quicklinks to bring you to some of the most interesting parts of the page, like the description, the reviews, and the wiki.
We're now calling the Public Profile a "Community Profile" and your Product Profile is now called "Your List."
The message center has been updated so you can mark your messages read or unread, do mass deletes, and open each message in a separate window (and there's some new functionality for sending messages to more than one other user).
Improvements to the Forums
In the new forum home, you'll see all of the same information (thread names, number of posts, etc), along with a new forum icon to indicate which areas have new content. When you are logged in, this icon will either be displayed in color or kind of gray. In color, it means there has been new activity in that forum since your last visit. Conversely, a gray icon means there are no new posts or threads for you. But just because there has been new activity doesn't necessarily mean you will want to read it. To mark a forum as read without going in, simply click on the icon or click the "Mark Forums Read" button. You'll also notice a little button which will allow you to collapse the forums in case you want a smaller view.
There are also what we call "Wiki stickies" that might appear at the top of a forum. If there are any announcements, we'll add them here.
On the New Posts page, you'll see a list of the threads that were most recently active in chronological order, along with the thread name, a preview of the last post, and the number of replies and views. As with the new forum view, an icon in color and a bold title indicates there has been new activity since your last visit to that thread.
Within the forum thread, you'll also see the conversation icon. An in-color icon and a bold title indicate that there have been new posts written. To get to the first post that's new to you, just click on the conversation icon. This feature is personalized for every logged in user based on his or her previous visits to the thread in question.
We've also got a new advanced forum search. You can search by keyword, narrow down by who started the thread, how many replies there are, when it was written, relevancy, even which forum it's in.
From each user's profile page, you can get to the log of every single one post written by that user (in reverse chronological order).
The threads themselves have received a bit of a touch-up. Now, the user's name, avatar, badges, location, join date, and post count are displayed in a post header. You'll also notice that "Rate Post" is now a nice little thumbs-up and the "Report to Admin" button is now bottom left. Additionally, attached to each post, you also see the new Reply and Quote buttons. You'll also now see a "Subscribe to this thread" button at the bottom of the post, and not just at the top.
In your replies, you can now quote multiple posts and you can also change the text size, change the color, even insert smilies.
And now....tell us what you think!!
