As you may have noticed, things look slightly different around here. That's because I've just finished upgrading us to the latest release of XenForo!
UPDATE (2019-7-21): Added option to link forum and Discord accounts.
Changes
Here's a brief rundown of the noteworthy user visible changes and features (going from 1.5 to 2.1):
- Performance improvements. Pages should load a bit faster on modern browsers.
- Enhancements to better accommodate mobile browsing.
- Push notifications for browsers and mobile devices (though not currently supported by Safari or iOS).
- New rich text editor with things like markdown support, tables, inline spoilers, and expanded media embedding options.
- Message editing is now completely in-place, no need to load another page for all options.
- Added a What's New section, making it easier to discover new activity.
- Reactions system adds options beyond 'like' (hover over the like button to view). Keep in mind the three reactions on the right side are configured as neutral so do not add to the recipient's score.
- Full emoji support with autocomplete like in modern chat apps. There might be a few custom smilies too.
- New content bookmarking system. Pretty much the same as doing it in your browser, but kept within the context of the forums and tied to your account, so might be handy depending on your usage.
New Styles
XenForo made a clean break with styles in the 2.0 release, ending backward compatibility for older styles. I had considered doing this upgrade back in March along with the hosting migration, but the prospect of rebuilding our style at the same time proved too daunting. I've finally done it though!
And done it properly too, so variations could be created relatively easily by adjusting a core color palette. It was sort of fun making them once I was past the initial hurdle of learning the system and finalizing our default style. Probably why I got a little carried away:
That's 14 color variants, plus a special one at the end. The Classic style isn't just a palette swap, but a total conversion (ha) based on how the forums looked a decade ago. It's not exactly the same, but should be more than enough to tickle the nostalgia of anyone who's been around the community for a while.
You can change themes by going to your account preferences or using the selector in the lower left just above the footer:
And that's all for this update. I don't anticipate any major issues, but do let me know if you run into any bugs or obvious style problems.
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