Forum Upgrades - March 13, 2019

[rhombus]

Good evening, everyone!

We are deeply appreciative of those of you who are able to assist the forum financially via Patreon or PayPal.  It is the generous contributions of members like you that allow this forum to survive and thrive.  We thank you all from the bottoms of our hearts. 

Today we have used some of your contributions in order to add some promised improvements to the forum experience.  In particular we have added three mods, with a fourth modification (a responsive theme) being implemented fully once we worked out the kinks.  Here is a rundown of the forum upgrades:

Improvements to the PM System
We now have a "conversation" system in place of the old PM system.  Now, don't worry, your old PMs are still there.  But the new system allows for PMs to be grouped by conversation as it was in the old Zetabords system. You can also invite new members to a conversation and they'll see everything that was before their join, but the owner keeps control over the conversations. Each conversation has its own group of participants, these are the people who can view the messages and attachments posted there. The owner of the conversation can specify if others can add participants to the conversation. Finally, attachments are now allowed in PMs as well.

Improvements to media embedding
We have greatly overhauled the media embedding system on the forum.  You can now simply post a link to YouTube videos, Twitter posts, FaceBook posts, and GoogleDrive documents and the forum will automatically embed the post for you!  You should no longer use the YouTube button to embed videos, since that feature is now deprecated - simply put in the URL and the forum will do the rest!

Improvements to Search Engine Optimization
This is mainly behind the scenes, but we are modifying some things behind the scenes in order to improve our search engine rankings and to dethrone the abandoned TapaTalk board from the #1 spot for Land Before Time forums.

Coming soon - a responsive theme
It has not escaped our attention that the forum looks subpar on mobile devices. We are currently preparing a responsive theme that will allow for a better mobile experience without compromising the look and feel of the forum on personal computers.  We will let you know when this change is implemented. 

So there you have it - a prime example of how your generous contributions are not only maintaining the forum, but also upgrading the experience for all members.  With your continued support we trust that this great community will last for many years yet to come. 

If you have any questions or concerns regarding these modifications then please do not hesitate to let us know.

~ GOF Admin Team

[Flathead770]

Just tried out the media embedding! A nice quality of life change. Haven't really done much in terms of PMing with Discord available but it certainly seems more versatile!

I'm looking forward to the more mobile friendly theme as well! 

Though I would like to thanks the admin team and everyone else involved in working to ensure this forum stays up! It's way harder to do then just sitting back throwing a couple dollars every now and then. 

[OwlsCantRead]

The new PM system seems robust, though I can't say I've tried it out since its implementation. Maybe someday.

Auto-embedding is awesome, though a part of my IT background will miss adding in the BBCode/HTML tags.