Patrick

So glad to hear that! Thanks Brian.

Thank you for the kind words, @ashworth! Happy to accept them and acknowledge the wider team at the same time. Also glad the new software is growing on you!

Getting excited!

Thanks so much for mentioning this, Ken. You did not make a mistake. I believe what happened here is you experienced a new feature here, which is that the software will try to save your current draft in the event of an error. So, for example, if the website went down or your internet went down, and the post didn't go through, it'll try to save whatever you wrote at the last point it was connected. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it will save some posts.

Hey all, With the launch of the new KarateForums.com behind us, I thought it would fun to periodically shine a light on a new feature and talk about how it works. Technology-wise, our community was the same for a long time, and there are so many new things that were added in this update. Most of them will be simple, straightforward additions that hopefully make your experience a little better. Some of them might be a bit bigger than that. Follow Topics Today, I wanted to highlight the Follow Topics feature. I will use the words topic and thread interchangeably here. On our old software, you could opt to receive email notifications when a thread had a new reply. This new feature operates similarly, but you have more options. You can receive notifications via: Email, like before Notification list (the community-based notification system represented by the bell icon at the top of our site) Push notifications, if you have them enabled on your browser or mobile device You can set these options from your Notification Settings, which are accessible via the Account Settings link, which you can find by clicking your username at the top of the site. I'll include a screenshot of that this area looks like below. Where to Find Follow Topics At the top of each thread, you can find a "Follow" button that will allow you to follow a thread without replying to it, which is handy if you are interested in a conversation only as a reader. It looks like this: You might be wondering, how can threads here already have followers? That is because we wanted to respect the choice members made to previously follow topics here. So if you had previously subscribed to a thread on our old software, you should still be subscribed to the thread. You can also find the option to follow a thread when you are creating or replying to one. Here's what that looks like: Customizing Your Settings If you want to automatically follow any thread you create or reply to, you can do that, as well in your Notification Settings. I made a deliberate choice to leave this off and put it in your hands, effectively making it a deliberate choice that you can make for yourself. By now, I think we are all used to communities and platforms that want to addict us and turn various notifications on my default, and we only notice them when they start flooding our inboxes or devices. That's not what I want for this community. You can easily adjust your notifications at any time through our Notification Settings, which also includes the ability to silence all push or email notifications, each with a single click. I hope you have found this post useful, and if you have any questions about this feature of how it works, please feel free to ask them here. If you see a question you can answer, please feel free to do so! Thanks for reading. Patrick

This is the first Member of the Month that has been honored since we moved to our new software and with that comes a small (but I think cool) change: In the past, we could only display one rank for a member. So while someone was Member of the Month, their rank in the forums could not be displayed. But now, we are able to display both at the same time. So, if you look at any of ashworth's posts, you'll see both the rainbow Member of the Month bar, but also the belt rank based on post count (which is currently Brown). It looks like this:

Hello, Thank you for visiting KarateForums.com. We recognize one member every month as the KarateForums.com Member of the Month for their positive contributions to this community. Our honoree for June is... @ashworth for the fourth time! A month from today will mark 18 years that ashworth has been a member of this community. Ashley, thank you for all of the incredible contributions that you have made here! I appreciate how you treat other members and the welcoming environment that you help create here. Thanks, Patrick

This is how I always pictured you in my head.

Thanks for the kind words and for mentioning this. The reason they are displayed more than once is because they have more than one short code. For example, the green one with the big smile can be accessed from all of these: :D :-D :grin: I can see how that is a little oft-putting. I am not sure I can do much about it without breaking past uses of two of those. But I'll keep it in mind in case I see a solution as it isn't ideal. Thanks again.

Thanks Bob!

Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you saying that.

Thanks so much, Liam, Ken, DarthPenguin, and Zaine! It means a lot.

Thanks for mentioning this! For now, I'm just leaving some placeholders there for the possibility of ads. We've always had them but they I think Google may have stopped serving ads for us a while back, so if they come back, I didn't want to spring them on anybody like they weren't already there. But again, appreciate you mentioning it!

Nailed it.

Don't worry about it! Glad to see actual people here. Thanks Ken.