GovCentral's Forums have been Upgraded!
Kyle Stone | GovCentral Contributing Writer
April 29, 2008
In case you have not noticed yet, we upgraded the GovCentral forums last night. We’ve added a robust new set of features which make it much, much easier for you to get your point across on our discussion boards. The changes we made also affect all of the site’s Group discussion pages.
Here are just a few highlights of what has been changed:
Watch a discussion: By clicking on “Watch a Discussion” the discussion will come to the top of your home forums page. Your most recent posts are directly under the watched discussions.
Email it to a friend: Share your favorite threads with your friends.
GUI editor for post creation – this editor gives a graphical interface for text formatting, link creation and image insertion.
Color coding – red: hot topic, yellow: active topic, grey: new post
Easy ability to add photos to your posts
Discussions signatures: users can enter a custom signature that will be automatically appended to the bottom of their discussion posts, located in Discussion Preferences
Online/Offline indicator – users that have been active on the site within the last 5 minutes now have a small green indicator next to their avatar in the Forums channel. This feature can be disabled per user in the Discussions Preferences.
Avatar Popup – if you click on a user’s avatar or username in a thread, you’ll get a popup that allows to you message the user, view their profile, friend them (if you’re not friends already) and tag them (if you’re friends). The online/offline indicator is also visible here.
Thumbs up/down ratings: On threads and individual posts
New content indicator: Any thread that contains content that’s new since the last time you viewed a thread and less than one week old is now marked with a small new indicator. This indicator can be cleared in bulk with the Mark All As Read link.
Advanced search: You can now search for topics by keyword, username, category or subcategory and date range.
