The CA Forum has been updated...

[Harrison]

The forums have now been updated to the new vBulletin 3.8.0

This new release adds a lot of small new features that improve existing parts of the forum.

New features

• Social group discussions
• Social group categories
• Private message sorting and filtering
• Private message history
• Quick edit for newer types of content (visitor messages and picture comments)
• Social group icons
• Social group transfers
• Private message quick reply
• Private message throttling (limit messages sent over a time period)
• Private message reporting
• Profile privacy (limit blocks to a subset of users)
• Lightbox navigation
• Thread prefix permissions
• Dismissible notices
• Google Adsense integration

Some of these features in more detail:

1. Private Messages can now be managed better, allowing you to arrange and filter them in order of date, by member.. etc. So your inbox now works more like a proper email client.
2. Quick reply is now included for PMs. So you don't have to press reply any more, and instead can replay to the PM just like Quick reply in the forum. Very useful as you can see the PM you are replying to more easily above the quick reply box.
3. You can now report a PM. This is useful if a PM is spam, or if another member is harassing you. Reporting this will send a copy of the PM to the admin, plus gives you the ability to include a message saying why you reported it.
4. There is a new Community menu at the top of the forum. This gives you direct access to community area of the forum including seeing what social groups exist, and the albums and pictures members have posted. The members list link is also now in here.
5. Social groups has been improved a lot. You can now create separate discussion threads within a single social group, as you can in a standard forum section, rather than just having the one long discussion thread as it was before.
6. Social groups can now be given icons. This is very useful to distinuish between groups in a list easily.
7. You can now move between images posted in a thread when viewing them in the popup lightbox window.
8. You can now limit content within your profile, and set various parts of your profile to be visible to everyone, registered users only, your contacts, or your friends.
9. Finally, Google Adsense integration. While I'm not that interested in plastering CA with googleads, on many vB forums admins do wish to add adverts into their sites. Until now this hasn't been that easy and has required third party mods and a fair bit of forum code and template editing. It is finally an official feature in vB. It just shows that the vB team working on the code do listen to the community and add needed features.

To read a full run down of all the new updates and improvements to vB 3.8.0 you can visit the official vB forum here.

Bugs

I am still trying to fix one bug. When you visit a couple of the forum areas you might see some php error messages at the top of the page before the actual fourm page is loaded. Everything does work as expected, so I'm not sure what is causing this error. I will fix it as soon as I find the cause. - FIXED

No outstanding bugs to report.

Please can you all let me know if you spot any other bugs or errors while you are using the forum.

I hope you like the new features.