I thought I would do a little note about some of the changes here, to help people get a bit better acclimated. I only saw the new board yesterday, the same as you guys, so I am no expert at all, just stumbling through like you guys, but here are a few things I have learned.

1--Your profile settings and board preferences are under "My Stuff"

2--Under Preferences, you will find your options for flat mode or threaded. Not sure which one is the default, but you can choose whichever one you want.

3--Under Preferences, under Your Preferred Forum Style, you can pick what color you want the background to be. You click on a color and hit Preview Style and that will show you what the board will look like with that color. Most of the colors are pretty self-explanatory, but Marshmellow in particular (which is what I am using), is BLUE. How many blue marshmellows have you seen?? crazy Anyway, you can click and Preview any or all of them. But when you preview it, it brings up another window to preview the color scheme, which, once you preview it, you have to CLOSE that window, as you cannot go anywhere in that window. Once you decide which color scheme you want, you have to scroll ALL the way to the bottom and save your changes.

4--There are a bunch of other options there under preferences. Most of them are pretty close to what they were before. Again, if you change any of those settings, make sure you scroll all the way down and save your changes.

5--Under email and private message options, as of this exact moment, the email notification of new PMs is not working, but hopefully that will get fixed soon. Under the last item there "From time to time we send out emails regarding this community. Do you wish to receive these emails", that's talking about a blanket email to all users. We have not done that in the past, and as of now, I doubt we will, so I wouldn't worry about that one, either way.

6--Under your profile you can put in your birthday if you want, upload an avatar, etc., the same as before. What's NEW, is at the bottom, under your Social Links, if you WANT to, you can list your Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, or Linked In accounts. Again, for any changes, make sure you scroll all the way down to the bottom and save any changes.

7--There is a FRIEND list there now, under your Profile. Not sure how that works, as I had some in mine already.

8--Under Miscellaneous under My Stuff, all the way at the bottom, there is an option for Chat. We haven't used that yet, but will need to check it out soon.

9--Again, under Miscellaneous under My Stuff, if you have been using the "who's online" feature before, it's there under Miscellaneous now.

10--If you need to clear your cookies, that's also there under Miscellaneous at the bottom.

11--As of now, the photo upload option does NOT work, but Eric will be working on that and hopes to get it working sooner or later.

12--Again, as of now, there is not a link to the Cruise Calendar or to the Travel Calendar for the SXM and BVI forums. Soon come, should happen soon.

13--When replying on the board to a note, the DEFAULT is Quick Reply. Quick Reply does NOT allow you to insert links, pictures, quotes, smileys, etc., (unless you have memorized the UBB code for what you want to do). If you want to do any of those things, you need to scroll down to the Use Full Editor button, located below the Quick Reply box. Frankly, I think that is a PITA, not sure whether we will be able to change that setting or not.

14--For you Facebook folks, we now have a LIKE button.

15--On the FRONT page, the one that lists all of the forums, the weird looking three dots to the LEFT of the icons for the individual boards for SXM, BVI, etc., indicate whether there are new posts on that particular board since the last time you visited. To begin with, once you have read the notes that you are interested in, you need to MARK ALL READ, so that is re-set for the future, the next time you come to the board. To do so, scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE WHOLE BOARD, ON THE FRONT PAGE, below the General Travel Photos Forum, and click on Mark All Read. You only need to do that once, the first time you're reading the board.

16--Within the individual forums, there are boxes which show which threads have new posts. The color of the box is dependent on which style sheet color scheme that you have picked.

Well, that's a couple of things that I have learned so far anyway.


Carol Hill