Have you noticed? 

After five months of being admin on this new CacheWalker site, I thought it was about time we had a spring clean. As always your voices are louder than ours at Admin Towers, so if there is anything you don't like, or things we could make better, please don't be shy to say  We're the users of the forum after all, but I, along with Altra, think that these updates will prove to be popular 

You've probably noticed the main one. As soon as you logged on  . But I'm going to be running you through every single update that has been made to hopefully improve user experience. Of course, there are very very little updates, which you may or may not ever notice - I won't bother to go into those, you can discover them for yourselves  So, here are the updates:

Introducing Portal. A faster way to be in the know of everything going on.

As soon as you logged on, you'll have noticed that you don't arrive in the board index. Instead you arrive in a (currently) pretty basic Portal - the whole point of this, is for you to be in the know of everything that's been going on - no matter how long you've not been online. Of course, it's very easy to get lost in it all at first, with all the different widgets, so I'll go ahead and explain it all. Here's the portal:



On the top left you will find your User Control Panel. A quick way to see what's new with you, and below you can see who else is online.

The centre is dominated by a "Recent Posts" box - no longer will you have to scroll down looking for the darker ammo box - all the recent posts are there, waiting for you to be read (You can of course go back to the index and do it the old way, will come back to that)

Finally, on the top right, you will find the "Current Polls" - now you can vote in the Weekly poll, right from the portal - no need to enter the thread and do it manually. One click as soon as you arrive, and your vote is cast

On the bottom left, you will find a search bar, a recent events and news box, and the Monthly Featured Geocache (see thread in Members only) Now you can search the entire site from the moment you arrive, and see what's going on with the wider Geocaching community. The Monthly Geocache is good to see which cache you should put on your #1 "To Do" list 

On the bottom right, you will see a contact form. Fill in this form to e mail the admins, with whatever you like - suggestions, feedback, complaints about the forums - guests can use this just to gain more general information on what the forums are about. This should prove to be a handy feature for some, but of course not all.

Lastly, in the bottom centre of the Portal you will find the Shoutbox...

Shoutbox. Geocaching discussion. Instantly.

Now you don't need to post a whole thread asking how someones day caching was. Just shout in the shoutbox. Just like a live shout feature, when several members are online why not shout "Hi" and start a live chat? No need to refresh the portal, the shoutbox updates itself every second  This feature should prove popular with most, and you have to be a member, logged in, with granted permission to use it - so you can be sure shouts (aka chat) will be appropriate - we're also working on building in a filter.



As I write this I notice something - ignore the "Edit" and "Puzzle" buttons right to the title - only I can see those  Back to the shoutbox... You can include all BBCode that you can see when posting replies like this, and select whichever smiley you want to use in your shout... And, as you can see above, using the shoutbox is as easy as it seems - the shouts at the top are the newest. I think that the shoutbox is a great advancement on the site, but why not just post how you feel even if no one is there like "Evening" or "Had a great day caching" so others can reply when they go back onto the portal? It will be interesting to see how we all use the Shoutbox in the days to come.

Obviously, if we all decide we like the Portal and want to keep it, others may want to use the forums in the traditional way. The Portal really is a Portal, an entrance to the site - just click the "forum" tab under the logo or follow the link in the "Welcome" box at the top 

Karma. Thank you. And thanks again.



Like a post you see? Learnt something useful? Not happy with how a post came across? Disagree with something said? You will notice on all threads under our user information two new buttons have appeared - "Thanks" and "Smite". It's as simple as it sounds really... say thanks to a user for a post, and their Karma goes up... Smite a user and their Karma goes down. This should be a good way to reward the many, if not all members, who post useful things, start interesting threads etc....

It's a warning!!

This update will apply to all users, but only the Moderators (walktall and tarmacjohn) along with the Admins (myself and Tech-Support Altra) can use it. Thankfully we haven't gotten to the point, yet, where people are posting inappropriate and irrelevant posts, so we can simply issue warnings (Unless they are spammers, where accounts will be deleted as soon as they are discovered) This was one such minor update, but thought it would be worth mentioning just to let everyone know.

So, that's all that really needs a mention. The rest is pretty much a silent update.....  We hope you will give the new features a chance, but please don't be shy to reply on this thread with your own opinion, or with any questions you may have regarding the updates, or ways we can make the Portal, and the rest of the new features, better 

GG