Today a couple of new features and changes went live on the forums.
RSS-feeds
First of all, there are now (finally!) RSS-feeds for the forums. There's a bunch of them, here's a quick rundown with links:
Main feed - All new posts from all categories in one combined feed
News feed - New topics from this category (i.e. posts I create concerning the site etc.) only
All topics feed - Like the main feed, but it only includes new topics, not replies to existing topics
Then there are also individual feeds for each category and even for every single topic! I won't make a linklist of these here of course, but you can find them when you are in the specific topic or category that you want to watch by clicking on your browser's RSS-icon.
New to RSS? Read Google's excellent introduction.
New policy for new members
In order to combat spam, every new member needs to get 1 approved post before being able to post regularly; that is without the need for a moderator to review and approve the post before it gets shown publicly.
As soon as you have at least 1 post, you don't need to worry about this ever again. And you can still post a bunch of posts while waiting to get that 1 post approved, and as soon as 1 of them gets approved - the rest will get approved automatically and show up in the forums!
Other changes
- Quick Reply at the bottom of all topics, so that you can write a reply without changing the page. Hidden by default, click "Show Quick Reply" on the bottom of a topic to use it.
- You can now not only report posts to moderators - but also PMs! If you got a spam PM, an abusive PM etc., you can click the report icon and a moderator will be able to read it and take action.
- If a post has been altered by someone else while you've been editing it, you will be informed first
- New "Unread posts" quick search at the top of the board index page - shows you all topics with unread posts from all categories
- PM history now only shows PMs of users you currently reply to.