Forum upgrade?

30/9/2008 5:05:10

gavin

Posts: 186
Since: 10/5/2005
Region: Swansea, UK - now live in Staines
Status: offline

okay in a long nutshell changes include the following for admin purposes and most for the member benefits:

# New Theme & Skin feature allows user to change the entire user interface using the ASP.NET's Skin & Theme.
# Template allows user to change the display of messages / forums / almost aspects of the display by customizing User Controls
# AJAX enabled user action to improve user experience. Fewer full page reloads.
# Reward point system & Mark as answer - user can assign certain points to a question to reward the best answer. Reward points can be given based on User Group Membership.
# Community moderation - users can now flag messages as inappropriate and automatically remove them without moderator intervention. Auto-ban offenders for a set period of time.
# Integrated Captcha to protect the system from spam attacks.
# Forum Filter - users can now decide which forums to see on the user interface, preventing unimportant forums from cluttering the user interface.
# Daily & Weekly Digest for forum and topic subscription. Users no longer have to receive new post notifications one-by-one.
# Totally improved Search Engine- producing more relevant and updated results. No more time wasted on irrelevant and incomplete results.
# Pinned message priority levels - moderators can now pin a message and assign different priority for different thread. Pinned posts are no longer "just a bunch of important messages".
# Splitting / Joining threads - providing a means to join related topics into one or split an off-topic message into a new thread, greatly enhances the management of threads.
# DHTML popup instead of regular popup which does not trigger popup blockers.
# Totally revamped Photo Gallery interface w/ AJAX to improve usability. Users can see a list of thumbnails when viewing a photo.
# DHTML menu to make the UI less cluttered. We focus on displaying the content, not the buttons / options in this version.
# Moderator Permissions - grant different permissions for different moderators based on user group membership.
# Custom PGDCode (forum message formatting code) allows admins to define PGDCode in the admin control panel without having to touch the source code.
# User Group Membership Expiration - Allows you to define length of group membership. Ideal if you want users purchase membership in order to view the forum.
# Expanded Group Based settings and permissions - allows even more powerful group based permission design.
# Forum Management with Inheritance - making forum management a lot easier. Define setting and permission only once and sub forums automatically inherits parent's settings.
# ASP.NET Default SQL Membership Provider integration (and the whole Membership Provider pattern in general). No coding / user importing & exporting required.
# Uses Forms Authentication - easier integration with external membership system (in addition to the Default SQL Membership Provider).
# Custom Stats with auto update - producing reports easily and periodically without user intervention.
# Database based error logger - detect intrusion and captures the offender's IP. Allows owner to figure out what went wrong easily.
# Asynchronous emailing - prevent CPU threads from blocking the web server request.
# Integrated Spell Checker. We no longer reply on browser add-ons to support spell checking.
# Medium Trust environment (shared hosting) and the new IIS 7 Integrated Pipeline mode support. Features are carefully designed to support the 2 popular server settings.

Sounds all good but not necessary and so I have decided to leave the forum as is.