As we have finally made the move away from vBulletin, you will notice several changes. Here's a guide to the key changes. Firstly, a note on bookmarks. Your old bookmarks could potentially be outdated. We recommend bookmarking: http://www.assemblergames.com Let's look at the home page first: Social Media links Did you know we have pages on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+? Why not follow us! Should the website go offline again, you will find updates on these pages. Preferences Click your user name to find your forum preferences. This is also where you'll find the log out button. Let's go over a few key sections: Personal Details Please check your personal details - note that the forum may now make your age more prominent, so hide this if you don't like it! Contact Details There are a number of new fields here - Facebook, Twitter etc. Please review these if you'd like people to be able to keep in contact on social networking sites. Privacy Check your privacy settings to ensure they are to your liking. External Accounts You may now sign in via Facebook, Twitter or Google. If you wish to associate your social media accounts with your profile, do so here. PMs / Conversations PMs are now called conversations. Don't worry - we will still be telling users to PM each other... just be aware that this is where you'll find them! You may start a new conversation with a user, which uses an auto-lookup field when you start typing their user name. If you click Show All..., you will find a familiar list of PMs. At the bottom of the screen is a button marked Conversation Display Options. Click that, and you will have the option to filter your PMs so you only see conversations with a specific member. Alerts Alerts are much like notifications on Facebook. You will receive alerts when you are warned, tagged in a post, someone likes a post of yours, someone follows you, someone replies to a watched thread and other similar instances. Forum views You can look at your watched threads or new posts since you last logged in, rather than the default view. Search You can search via the quick search box, or use the advanced search tool by either clicking Search Forums, or clicking on the search bar and then clicking More... The advanced options are self explanatory, but it's worth mentioning that you can search via thread prefixes, which will show you all items for sale or wanted in a particular region. Quick Navigation The quick navigation icon allows you to jump to any forum, PMs, recent activity or profile options. Style Chooser The style chooser allows you to switch between styles. Currently, the default style is reminiscent of the classic ASSEMblergames style from 2006-2012. For those of you who joined between 2012-2015 and prefer the recent look, there is a blue and white theme. Help The help section contains the TOS and cookie policy, plus explanations of the BB Codes, smiley codes and trophy system. RSS feed Self explanatory RSS feed. Read forums You can see at-a-glance which forums contain new posts (red speech bubble) and which don't (grey speech bubble): You may notice that the old post icons are gone - sorry! However, they're replaced with a pretty intuitive system - the thread icon is now the avatar of the user who posted it: So that thread is posted by ASSEMbler. That's not all! If you reply to a thread, you'll see your own avatar in the corner: Creating a thread Creating a thread is much the same as it was with vBulletin. However, the default editor is WYSIWYG, so you see the formatted text rather than the BB Code. Let's look at an example: Most options are the same, but here are a couple to be aware of: BB code editor If you want to switch to BB code, use the button on the right of the window, which looks like a page. Insert... In the insert group, you will notice smilies, pictures and videos. If you click the plus button, you will get further options - quote, spoiler (creates a clickable drop-down spoiler box to hide text), code (quotes text without formatting - good for quoting source code) and strike-through. Note that YouTube links can be directly pasted into the WYSIWYG editor, and the forum will embed the video. If it does not show up immediately, view the post preview. If it does not show up there, you have probably provided an invalid link. Watch thread Your preferences will probably be set to watch your own threads by default. This will give you alerts when someone replies to your threads. You may untick this if you do not want alerts, or you may get e-mail alerts. This is handy if you have a for sale thread and won't be visiting the site frequently. Drafts You can click the Save Draft button (floppy disc icon) to save your text without posting, and come back to resume your post later. Tagging users You may now tag users by typing the @ symbol, followed by their name. Start typing their name and you will get an auto-lookup drop-down with matching users. When you tag a user, they will receive an alert that they have been tagged. Prefixes (Marketplace posts only) You may now use prefixes on your posts in the Marketplace and WTB forum. This is a list of regions. Please select the one that matches your location - you can choose from US, UK, EUR, JPN, CAN, AUS/NZ, ASIA, RU and S.AMERICA. We haven't included all countries, as the drop-down list would be hard to navigate! When you select a country, this will be highlighted before your thread title. You may perform a search by prefix, which will allow you to see what items are for sale and wanted in a specific region. Multi-quoting posts If you hit reply next to a post in a thread, you will notice that the post content is pasted into the reply box at the bottom. Multi-quoting is even easier now - simply hit reply next to another thread on that page. That post will also be pasted into the reply! Interacting with posts We encourage you to get interactive with posts! If there's a post you find particularly helpful (or otherwise good), you can like it (next to the reply button). Users will receive trophy points for likes. You will also be able to share any page using the social media buttons at the bottom of each page: Reporting posts Click on the report button under the post in question. You will get a pop-up dialogue box: Simply enter the reason you are reporting this post, then hit Report Post. You may receive a notification when we have dealt with the reported post. Using the Media Gallery We now have a gallery system for easy management of photos. Best of all - it's really easy to use! You'll find it on the Media tab. Please bear in mind our rules on acceptable content - in particular, you should only upload media you have the right to use. All media is uploaded at your own risk, and we accept no responsibility for your actions. Stock photo libraries can and do find copies of their images used without permission, and issue hefty fines. Adding photos and videos Hit the Add Media button at the top of the page. You will have two options - add to a site category, or add to an album. Categories Categories are essentially folders relating to a particular topic, e.g. a specific console. They are viewable by all. When you choose a category, you will see the following: If you want to upload an image, simply use the Add Media button to upload it from your computer, or enter the URL. You may also embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Dailymotion, Metacafe and Liveleak. Simply click the Embed a Video tab, then enter the URL. Albums You may create your own albums and set who you want to see your album. Staff will always be able to see your albums and media. Once you have created your album, you can again choose to upload images or video. Video is the same as per categories. If you are uploading images, again either choose a file (or multiple files if you have Flash enabled) or enter the URL. When the image uploads successfully, you should see something like this: Click Save Media, and you're done! Editing images You may perform basic editing, such as cropping, rotating and flipping, on an image via the Media Tools (pencil icon): Viewing albums and categories The left sidebar allows you to search and browse albums and categories. We encourage social interaction with the Media Gallery - feel free to like, watch share and comment on media, galleries and categories! To help others find images and videos easily, please try to name and tag your media meaningfully.
Just a quick mail to say I've seen the mail/. Busy as hell this week in work so I've no time to ready anything at the moement but will do ASAP.
I'm pretty sure you were up in that ball park (archive.org suggests you had 18k-odd in November), but a couple of deprecated forums were (inadvertently) deleted, which might cause a post count drop. If anyone notices a post count drop - apologies, but it's probably a side effect of the rather complex import process.
Nice features! I personally like the user tagging and post liking feature. The post's like count will make it more relevant in search queries?
The site looks professional, and more feature rich - was worth the downtime! . I'm not into tweeting or facebook or anything else social networking (i'm not on any of them); however those that are i'm sure will love the extra features and "like".
The forum now looks much nicer than previously, and it seems to be more smooth when loading pages too.
Love the new forum! XenForo looks pretty solid. And the theme is very clean, love it! Thanks for the guide retro, and thanks ASSEMbler and the rest of the staff for bringing back the forums! Cheers!
Just quickly - remember that this is a guide on using the new features of the site. Feel free to post bug reports here and other suggestions here. As the thread was going rather off-topic, the debate about social media has moved here.
Something daft but niggling me a bit as the answer will be obvious I guess - what's the "points" refer to?
Ah, so this is what happened to the forum. I wonder how long vbulletin sticks around elsewhere, it's practically "retro" at this point. But then so are forums themselves in this social media dystopia.
When looking at the New Posts page, is there an indicator I'm missing that signifies whether I've posted in the thread already?
Sorry, I haven't added that yet. Posts now have the avatar of the original poster. If you've replied to one, your avatar appears smaller, on top of the original avatar, on the bottom-right. (Updated now - see above for examples) Yes, mentioned in the bug reports, I think it was. No huge loss, really.