We Are Live - Community Feedback

Dear Community Members,

We are excited to announce that we are live on our new forum platform! We’ve worked hard over the last several months with a leading design and product firm to deliver a cleaner, faster and more engaging experience for you. Our goal is to provide modern design and technology to make the site run faster, smoother and more reliably. All of the valuable content within the community is still here, even though the layout may look different.

A Consistent Experience Across All Devices
The site is optimized for all screen sizes, including mobile. All features are available and ready to use on all devices.

Speed and Reliability Are Key
No one should have to wait for information. This site has been built to be much faster and more reliable, period.

New Homepage Experience
Your home page now features the most active forums, trending discussions, featured showcases, and top contributing members. This will help keep you up to date on what’s happening in your community and eventually become a very personalized experience for our members with all the great content you love surfaced effortlessly for you.

Search
We have introduced new search algorithms, powered by an industry-leading AI platform, that will help you find information faster. We plan to roll out new features to continue improving search, and to power many additional areas of the forum.

Due to the volume of content, our search platform may take some time to complete indexing. During this process, you may see a limited number of posts until indexing has been completed. We appreciate your patience.

Easy to Use and Navigate
We have made the design clean and simple to use. Near the upper right-hand corner of the community, you will see navigation icons.

The first icon is for what’s new on the site.

Clicking on it, by default, will take you to new unread posts. On that page, you can click on additional tabs as well, such as Popular, if you prefer to view active topics.
Clicking the list icon next to “NEW” will bring you to the full forum listing.

You can also navigate by clicking the 3 vertical dots.

Clicking on your avatar will give you a drop-down menu for all things related to your account.

Dark Mode
We have introduced Dark Mode. One of our favorite features allows you to access the site with a power-saving, and easier on the eyes dark mode. You can access it in the drop-down menu under the 3 vertical dots.

Save Bookmarks
Now you can save your favorite discussion threads and posts! Bookmarks are a handy way to remember and easily find great content or stuff you want to read later.

We also wanted to make it easier for new users to understand the lingo of forums. We have cleaned up various language to more commonly recognized phrases including:

• Following - Thread subscriptions, and Watched are now known as Following
• Conversations – Private Messages or PMs are now conversations and can be accessed from the user avatar drop-down in the main navigation
• Showcase – Showcase is designed for users to "showcase" items/projects through the use of uploaded images, text descriptions and custom content categories. It’s a way to visually and textually provide detailed information on the content you wish to share. The showcase would be similar to a catalog, whereas the gallery would be like a photo album. It can be accessed from the drop-down menu with the 3 dots.

These are just a few of the great new functions and features to try on the site. Take a tour and look around! If you have any questions, please check out the HELP section for some quick FAQs about the new platform - Help Section

Please let us know what you think about the new experience. Your feedback is important to us.

Thank you all for your support during this amazing journey!