As you have certainly noticed by now 8052.com has a significantly different look and feel. The changes are both cosmetic as well as functional. These changes are the result of weeks of development, testing, and modification and hopefully have created a new system which will be easier and more enjoyable to use. The rest of this message outlines the functional changes that have been made to the website.

NOTE: I have been using the new version of the website for the last month and a half so I'm optimistic most bugs have been detected and fixed. If you detect any minor problems please report them in this thread. If you detect any errors that could represent a security problem please EMAIL ME.

Account Settings

Registered members will find that the account settings page is much more friendly and provides many, many additional parameters which can be used to configure the system to your liking. The easiest way to understand all the new features is to simply visit the account settings page and look at the options. If anything isn't clear you may click on the "click for help" link at the top of the page.

Account settings now lets you configure whether or not you wish to share your email address in the forum directly, let others email you via 8052.com without sharing your email address, or simply make yourself unavailable via email. This is now configured globally for your account rather than on a message-by-message basis in the forum.

You can choose to see the "8052.com News" all the time, only when there is new news, or never and whether or not you wish to see who else is online. In either case you may have that information displayed either on the top or bottom of the page.

You may select your time zone so all the date/times displayed by the system are expressed in your local time and you may also choose the format for dates and times to be displayed. You may further select whether you wish to navigate the site in graphical or text mode which may speed things up for users on slower Internet connections.

The account settings also contains a section that allows you to configure the message forum. Those features will be described next.

Forum Changes

The forum has been significantly overhauled. Virtually all of the code has been rewritten. In addition to new features the forum should also operate faster.

Members may choose to navigate the forum in the traditional 8052.com threaded format or may view threads in a phpBB-style sequential "flat" format. Members may select which columns are shown on the main forum index page, configure how many threads are shown on each main index page, and select how many days worth of threads should be highlighted in the main index (good for seeing all the threads active in the last 1, 2, 3 days, etc.). All these features are configured in the account settings page.

The server will now keep track of which messages you have read in each thread so the "new message" flag will be more accurate. The "new message" flag will also be retained even if you surf the website from different computers.

The city and country of each poster is displayed in every message without having to manually view the poster's profile. New users are strongly encouraged in the sign-up page to provide this information but it is still not an enforced requirement.

Messages that have been posted may now be edited by the original poster for 20 minutes. This will allow those that post a message and immediately recognize an error (formatting, missing data, etc.) to correct it. Once 20 minutes has passed the message will be frozen and will no longer be editable.

When replying to a message the subject of the message will not default to "Re: subject" but instead will remain blank even though all messages will require a subject. Hopefully this will cause participants to give subjects to each of their replies that more accurately reflect the contents of the reply and will avoid threads where every single reply has the same subject which doesn't help anyone in identifying the real topic contained within messages within a thread.

The forum has been modified to support multiple forums in an integrated fashion. This means the site can handle multiple forums that are logically separate but if any given member wants to see all messages in a single forum they can configure their account so that messages from other forums are displayed as if they were part of the main forum. At this time there are no additional forums but I expect there will be a couple of specific forums added in the future in relation to "Projects" (see below).

Projects

8052.com now supports the concept of "projects." A project, as the name implies, is a type of community effort in developing some project of common interest. This is along the lines of a mini-SourceForge. Projects may consist of any combination of the following: 1) A project web page, 2) A project code library to contain code and files contributed to the project, 3) A specific message forum where the project may be discussed.

At this time no projects have been established by expect that projects will be established for the Video '52 effort that has been advanced by Phillip M Gallo and probably in the future I will attempt to reignite the "8052 computer" thread as a project.

If you have an idea for a project that you'd like to see hosted as such on 8052.com please let me know. I do not promise that all suggestions for projects will actually be accepted as projects. It depends on whether there is some reason to believe that multiple people will be interested in participating in it and/or providing feedback and, to be frank, whether it sounds like an interesting project to me. Potential projects that only have one participant and are not bound to generate a lot of discussion in a project-specific forum should simply be implemented as user home pages.

8052.com News

Members may now contribute news to the 8052.com News page. News articles should be written in third person and be as professional and well-written as possible. News articles submitted will not be visible in the news section until they are reviewed by the webmaster or moderator.

Site Members

A Site Members directory has been added. This function allows you to browse all the users on the site by the first letter of their name or by searching for a specific user.

User Pages

The site will now enforce a little more control on the rendering of user pages. Many pages will be unaffected but some will be rendered slightly differently. This is done in the interest of trying to maintain a certain level of consistency in the navigation and feel of the website. This was also done to ensure that the navigation sidebar is always present--in the past some user pages were such that the sidebar was not present making subsequent navigation difficult.

If you have a user home page at 8052.com you may wish to check that it still formats correctly. If you do not like the formatting you may need to adjust some of your HTML code and upload new versions of your HTML file(s).

Additionally all the user home pages have been reviewed and we have removed those user home pages from the list that said things like "Under construction" or which provided no significant information. If your home page is no longer on the home page list you may republish it by giving it a description in your "my home page" control panel. However I will occasionally review the home page list and remove those home pages which contain no useful information, simply say "under construction," do nothing more than act as a springboard to an external site (just add your external site to the Links page instead), or which consist of nothing but a resume. Resumes are fine if they accompany useful information in the same home page. Stand-alone resumes with no other useful information will be removed.

Note that the "removal" of a home page doesn't actually mean they are deleted. They will just not be included in the home pages list.

Conclusion

I think that pretty much covers the changes that have been made to the website. If I have missed any please feel free to ask or, if I remember, I'll mention them here. Feedback and further suggestions are certainly welcome.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster