From far and wide the clarion calls: Rally, Guild Launchers!  Rally to the blog!  To the forums!  Most important of all… rally to the Patch Notes!

Our developers have been hard at work, grinding their stubby coding fingers to the bones to produce new features!  Check them out:

POST VOTING

Do you like that funny cat picture your guild leader just posted?  Or maybe someone posted a raid strategy that is, hands-down, the clearest explanation of why you need to run when pools of lava form beneath you.  Now you can give that kind soul credit!

• Users now have a global and site-specific GL Score, which represents the votes they’ve received on their posts; this score appears in member reports and on their user profile
• Forum posts now have voting functionality – just hover over the post and you’ll get the option!  (For Admins: moderation functionality is now also hidden until you hover over them.)
• Don’t like the hover?  Turn it off in the admin menu!
• Don’t think your crew would like this?  Voting is also disable-able on the admin menu!

Post Display Streamlining

The quote, ip, delete, edit buttons and the new post voting buttons are now tucked away under a hover. Less clutter and more focus on the content instead of the buttons. The end result is that those options are no longer shown on every post initially.  If you want to interact with the post just place your cursor over the post and the buttons will dutifully appear for you. This functionality is in place in the World of Warcraft forums and we think it improves forum appearance pretty significantly.

If for some reason you do not like this behavior it can be disabled in the Admin area on the Forum Features page. We hope you like it though and take some time to get used to it.

Temporary Ban Functionality

This is something I’m personally excited about.  Now you don’t just have the banhammer options by username and IP address – you don’t even have to completely ban them!  You can flag a user to be temporarily banned from posting (say, a couple hours), or banned from the site (a two-day ban for acting up?).

Expanded Moderation Privileges

There’s now a new moderation page on the ‘Permissions’ tab of the Admin menu – ‘Member Moderation’.

From here you can disable individual user avatars and signatures!  We’ve heard of at least a few instances where users have left guilds and changed their profile pics to something… well, less-than-savory, and this lets you deactivate it for that user on your guild site!

This is also a new permission that can be assigned to Permissions Groups on the ‘Permission Groups’ tab, if you want this to be something your forum moderators will handle.

Calender Event Deletion Confirmations

Now, when you go to delete a calendar event, you will get a confirmation prompt to make sure you don’t accidentally delete something you wanted to keep!

The Rest!

As usual, our developers have also been tweaking the system to enhance performance.  This means faster page loads and an overall better experience on the system.

Have a feature you want to see implemented?  Check out our Feature Requests area to see what other people are suggesting and let us know what we can do to make things even more epic than they already are!