Hi everyone,

We are really excited to announce the release of version 1.6 of the neoforums. This version has some exciting changes that we hope will increase user participation in our news posts and increase useability of the forums in general. This update features news/revivew comments integration with the forums, dynamic mainpage, sitewide and friend status updates, and the ability to dynamically reorder your my.neoforum page, and a slew of smaller changes.

Comments Integration

News/Review Comments Integration is all about allowing members to read and participate in news posts and reviews right in the comfort of the forums. Every news post we create will have a corresponding forum thread in an appropriate forum. It allows members to discover news posts in relevant forums (eg a posting about Guild Wars 2 will go into the GW2 forum) and participate right in the forum, while those reading the news will interact with the exact same posts as those seen in the forum. A side bonus of this integration is that anyone posting comments in news will actually bump their total forum post up :thumbs:

Here's an example of a forum thread created from this integration:

PlayStation 3 "Slimmer" model revealed and the news article PlayStation 3 "Slimmer" model revealed

You'll also notice that news comments are paginated and can be sorted from newest to oldest, or oldest to newest (this is a sticky setting)

Dynamic Mainpage

The forums mainpage has been tweaked to open and close each category dynamically, with no page refresh required. The behaviour has been standardized with how my.neoforum's favourite forums area works. This change affects both full mode and mobile mode (the latter is especially useful). In mobild mode the entire category bar is touch sensitive . I know this is something often requested and I hope it proves useful.

This is not the final change to the forums mainpage that we will do in the long term, but it is a short term change that improves its useability quite a bit. So don't go thinking this is some major change and that we will be satisfied with the mainpage for a long time.

Dynamic re-ordering of forums in my.neoforums

The my.neoforums system now allows you to reorder your favourite forums using a modern drag and drop UI. Just click the "Edit Display Order" button, and drag category bars or forum rows into the position you want. You can only resort forums within their respective categories.

I think everyone will find this new UI much better than the old school interface .

Status Updates in Mainpage and my.neoforum

The most controversial of our changes is the introduction of Status Updates in the forums main page and within my.neoforum. In the mainpage you will see sitewide updates from everyone on the site. You can like updates by hovering over them. Clicking the comments icon takes you to the activity page to comment (and yes, we WILL upgrade this and the membercards so you can do dynamic commmenting).

In my.neoforum you will see the latest updates from people you have added to you friends list. This is a really neat feature that some might not like at first, but we feel that as we roll out our other features and as people discover the power of the status updates that these will be some of the most popular and interesting things you can find on the site.

I think you will find that other upgrades we roll out in the near future will make these things stand out even more, and really drive the usefulness and fun of status updates.

Note that in this initial release, you will only see status updates made in the past 48hours or since your last login, whichever is longer.

New Status Updates page in your profiles

We've added a filter to your Friends' activity log so you can see all status updates from your friends. This area is using our older design concept so it doesn't look quite up to speed, but its a great way to browse status updates of all your friends.


Full list of changes:

+ News and article comments are now integrated in the forums! Every news and article has a corresponding forum thread.
+ Comments on news and articles now increment your forum post count
+ brand new dynamic reorder of my.neoforum favourite forums!!
+ forum main page now dynamically opens and closes categories on click without page refresh
+ sitewide user status updates are shown in the forum main page now
+ your friends' status updates are shown in my.neoforum now
+ change forum post buttons so that cursor is now placed between newly inserted tags. For tags that have additional options like the link tag [link name=][/link] the cursor is placed after the = sign.
- fix forum posting form "img", "img link", "quote" and "spoiler" buttons that still insert the nTag even if the cancel button is pressed on the prompt (report).
- fix my.neoforum sections being opened or closed not properly saving for certain users
- fix full mode PM threads with lots of participants pushing messages lower on page.
- duplicate post detection is more strict now for normal messages, but less strict for short messages that contain no URLs.
+ new "status update" filter in friend activity page so you can see all your friends' status updates.

Mobile Mode changes
+ my.neoforum mobile mode shows categories now in favourite forums.
+ mobile mode forum main page changes:
+ mobile main page also opens/closes categories without refresh
+ mobile main page cleaned up, made more touch friendly
+ mobile main page categories open/close using sliding action

v1.6.1 Update

We released v1.6.1 on Oct 1st, 2012. It contains the following changes:
+ status updates will now bit.ly all non Neoseeker URLs, and use neo.ly for Neoseeker URLs. This should make status updates much easier to read
+ my.neoforum has a new fixed rightbar concept. If your left hand side of my.neoforum is much longer than your right hand side you'll see this in action when you scroll down.
- thread split and merge by moderators will no longer send notification bombs to users
+ quoted message links will still work after thread splitting/merging
- fix deleting sent PM threads that have no replies causes your PM Inbox count to go down

v1.6.2 Update (Oct 10 2012)

This is a minor change to help with an upcoming major change, but it does include a change to how visitor tracking works for tagged threads:

+ tags now correctly show visitors to the tag and to any threads tagged with that tag at the bottom. This is similar to how visiting a forum or a thread in a forum lists you as a visitor in the forum.
- fix =headers= to have top margin

v1.6.3 Update (Nov 15 2012)

This is a bug fix update and a small feature update.

Full list of v1.6.3 changes here.

Thanks and bugs

As usual, we'd like to thank all the beta testers who helped find problems and allowed us to polish this release before posting. Incredibly, the total beta period lasted 1.5 months with tons of bugs and useability changes. Thanks again all!

However, in spite of tons of testing, there are always bugs with big changes. If you find any bugs, please report them in our site or forum bugs forums.

Great new features. The comment integration should be a wonderful feature and should help to give some extra activity to forums like General PS3/360/PC/3DS.

I noticed the Status Updates were up and got excited.

These updates are amazing and what I have been waiting for forever on this site. So glad to see them finally come into play.

Good job neo team you guys rock!

Loving these status updates. They were such an underplayed part of the site, so hopefully we see that change. Awesome new updates!

I don't like the Status Updates makes it crampt and ugly. Should have the choice to hide it if you want.

Also hate the drop down catergories. Must prefer to wait a second for the page to load up tbh.

Excellent update, loving the changes to my.neoforum. Great job guys!

Ohey I'm on Faceseeker.

Animalover, could you force refresh (Ctrl+F5) your cache? The Active tab still has all of the groupings for me...only "Recently Visited" and "Pinned" lack the groupings.