New Features

Crystal · Post by **Crystal** » Sun Jul 15, 2007 2:38 am

A few new features have been added to the forum; try them out and let me know if you encounter any problems.

You will notice in the "menu/links" bar up at the top a couple of new buttons. You should all be familiar with profile, memberlist, search, gallery, and FAQ, but there are two new buttons:

1. Watched Topics
2. Quizzes

Watched Topics keeps a list of all the topics you are currently "watching" (and hopefully receiving email notifications when they are updated). From this area you can keep track of the topics you are watching and deselect those topics you no longer care to watch or receive notifications about.

Quizzes is currently set to allow forum moderators (Tammie and myself) set up one or more quizzes which can be true/false, fill-in-the-blank, or multiple choice in format. Any registered user can take a quiz once it is submitted. So far only a test quiz has been submitted, but I'm sure Tammie or myself will think of some fun ones in the near future. To access a quiz, you will need to click on the quizzes button in the top menu, then click the "quiz statistics" link, find the quiz you want to take by name, and click on its name.

Another new feature you may find useful is the "Save as Draft" feature which you can use if you'd like to save a draft copy of your post before submiting it. To use this feature, start a new topic or reply, but instead of clicking the submit button, click the button to the left of it which says "Save as Draft." This is good if you tend to write a lot like I sometimes do and want to take a break without losing your post. Once you have saved a draft, you can access it again if you are logged in by clicking the text which says "View your drafts and topics you have posted to" which can be found on the left hand side of this page, above the log out and "Helpful Finch Link".

Soon I am going to try adding one final feature which is a word censor feature. In theory (if I am able to get this modification installed correctly), if someone tries to submit a post with a banned word, they will not be allowed to make the post until they remove that word from their writing. This should help keep the forum family friendly.

Your comments are welcome! Enjoy the changes.

zookeeper · Post by **zookeeper** » Sun Jul 15, 2007 9:58 am

Crystal, could you add a space between "View posts since last visit" and "View your drafts . . ."?

I thought "since last visit" was broken since I was getting a totally unexpected list -- finally realized I was clicking on the one below it by mistake, they are so close together they look like one link.

Crystal · Post by **Crystal** » Sun Jul 15, 2007 2:35 pm

I sure can. Good idea.