Hello,

After many weeks of planning, we are happy to introduce to you our new forum, fully integrated within the rest of the web site. Besides a unified look for the whole web site, this move will allow us to offer more features to this site's community members. Those new features will be introduced progressively over the next few months.

Read on for more details...

What does this mean for the existing forum members?

Your account

If you had an account for our old forum, and if you participated in the forum, your account has been imported together will all the forum topics. Your user name and your password should be the same so you can log in right away. Your private messages have been imported, too.

Inactive accounts

Important note: if you registered but never posted in the forum, your account has not been imported. In 99% of the cases, the users who had never posted - or whose posts were deleted - were spammers, so we left their accounts behind. If you happen to be one of the few bona fide members who registered but didn't have time to post anything, you'll have to register again! Sorry!

Mail2forum

In the new setup, we don't have the equivalent of mail2forum, whereby members could sign up to receive forum posts in their mail boxes, and could post replies to the forum via email. We decided against this option for two reasons:

• Very few members were using this feature
• The people who liked this feature the most were spammers: their spam was delivered to people's mailboxes before we had a chance to intercept them.

Finding your way in the new setup

Here is a list to help you find your way in the new site:

• Create a new account: if you didn't already have one.
• Log in here, or use the login box at the side.
• View your account. Click on the 'edit' tab to change your settings. Clicking on the 'track' tab will show you if there are new replies to the topics your have participated in.
• Create a new forum topic (If you are logged in, see on the side menu the links 'create content' > 'forum topic'): make sure to select the forum you wish to post to. Or else, browse the forums, go into the one you would like to post to, and click on the 'Post new forum topic' link at the top.
• The new forum permits fully threaded discussions. If you want to reply within an existing forum topic, you can either reply to the original post by clicking on the 'add new comment' link, or reply to another comment within the thread by clicking on the 'reply' link below that comment.

Need help?

If there is anything that doesn't work as it should, check with me, the site's Janitor. Post a new topic in the technical support forum if you can, or contact us via email if you can't.

I'll reply to your technical questions and support requests in the forum.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy the new setup,

Yours,

webadmin/Janitor.