Here's some of the new features:
General Features (12)
Usernames will no longer be case sensitive.
The "cell highlight" hack will become a standard feature of all boards. You will be able to choose what color you want the highlight to be for both the main page and for boards (or you can choose no color to leave it standard).
Karma (optional feature). Each user can have their own karma, which other users can praise or smite a user to increase or decrease the users karma.
Reserved words will no longer effect staff members
If a category or board name is too long to fit in the jump, the forum jump at the bottom of the page will cut the name short and put "..."
An option for going to the "home" page of the board will be added to the forum jump.
If a user creates an account with the same username as someone who was deleted, the new user will not be able to edit or delete the older users posts. This will be based on a registration date check versus the time of the posting.
For dates, "Yesterday" will also be added in addition to the already existing "Today." Posts may show up as something like "Posted on Yesterday at 12:22 am"
All email addresses will have spam protection on them which will help make it so that spam bots will not be able to pick up your email address.
Numbers that are displayed such as number of posts on a board, number of posts a user made, etc will contain commas (so 10000 becomes 10,000)
Drop down menus are now used to change between different pages for viewing boards and threads. This allows you to specify any page you want, especially useful for boards and threads with many pages.
For displaying dates and times, you will now be able to specify 4 different options that will let you control the date and time. These options include am/pm or 24 hour time options, time zone choices, what format to display the date in (e.g. Jan 1, 2000, 01-01-00, etc), and options to reverse the month and day fields.
Profiles (17)
Signatures will be displayed on the view profile page
When a user's email address is changed -- by either an admin, or the user -- a new randomly generated password is sent and emailed to that user.
Last known IP address of user saved in profile
A notes section will be added so admins/mods can add notes that no one else can see
Disable / Enable account
Last login date
In addition to member groups, users will be able to have their own custom title.
You can choose if you want to see people's signatures when reading threads
You can opt to not display avatars when reading threads
You may choose to not receive any emails from the board administrators (mass emails will not send you mail)
Birthday will become a required field in the profile. As we do not allow users under the age of 13, an age check will be in place which will remove accounts of users under this age.
The server times will no longer default to east coast time. Everything will be based off of GMT. All user profiles will be updated accordingly to keep them in the correct time zone.
Location will be shown in mini profile
Registration date shown in mini profile
Clicking on "profile" at the top will allow you to view your profile. An option to edit your profile will be on that page.
Staff members have the ability to disable a user's account so that they can not use it.
If you disable a user's account, you can specify a number of days for it to last, so that after that amount of time they may use their account again.
Bookmarks (4)
We are introducing a new system to replace the notifications system. Using the bookmarks system, you will be able to bookmark different threads and have quick access to them from your profile screen.
For each bookmark, you can specify whether you would like to receive a PM, an email, or receive no notification when a new post is made in the thread that is bookmarked.
You will only receive notification that a thread has been updated one time until you view the thread again. This means that if 10 people post before you get back to a thread, you still only get notified once. Once you view the thread, you may then receive notifications again.
An option will be available to set what your default notification action should be for threads you bookmark. For example, you can set your default action to be to PM you. Then any time you bookmark a thread in the future, it will automatically set that bookmark to notify you by PM of any updates.
View Members (2)
The top posters page is no longer limited to 1 page. You can view all pages to see where all members rank in terms of posts.
A new caching system will be used so that when you view the members list it caches the results for 15 minutes so that subsequent requests for pages are sped up significantly.
Calendar (5)
An option to set who can view the calendar (Guests / Members / Admins and mods)
Ability to choose who will be able to add entries to the calendar
Edit calendar entry ability
Improved method for navigating from month to month (won't have to click 5 times to go 5 months ahead)
Automatic addition of birthdays to the calendar.
Home (3)
The "Last Post" column will display what the most recent thread is.
In the Info Center we will add "Most users online ever was X users on X date"
Info center will display today's birthdays
Posting / Polls / Modifying (6)
When you want to use a UBBC code, such as bold, you will be able to highlight text from your message and then click on the bold icon. The UBBC tags will be instantly added around the text you highlighted.
Moderators of a board will be able to change the name of any guest posts.
Add checkbox that a mod can select to sticky a post when it is posted / modified.
