Hi all,
I have been working on the site the last few hours. I've did my best to keep downtime to a minimum but it's impossible to upgrade things and not have some so I apologise to anyone who logged on and couldnt post etc
Latest Forum Software
You wont notice any difference when browsing but we have upgraded to the latest version of vbulletin
Members can now have their own blogs
I have been wanting to offer members a better blogging option for some time. Only days after I upgraded the
THF Blog, VBulletin announced that they were launching an official blog system for vbulletin forums. This is one of the reasons why I stopped working on the blog.
They launched the new blogging option a few days ago and I am happy to announce that today I added the
member blogs option to THF.
You can see the blogging sections
here. Long term THF members will quickly see that the blog setup is very similar to our old
journals section. At the moment there is not a script to migrate posts from the old journal to the new blog system but a lot of other forum owners are looking for it so im hoping that it will be released soon.
I only added it today so I havent had a chance to do much testing etc as yet however I will be working on it the next few days, particularly to incorporate the blog section more into the forums.
Enjoy
Upgraded to latest version of VBSEO
This is another upgrade that some of you might not notice. We used this script for 2 years. Essentially, it converts ugly looking page extensions to more search engine friendly html extensions. This increases traffic since pages have more keywords in the url.
When I did an upgrade in July I decided to remove the script to see how the site performed without it. At the time we were suffering a lot of downtime and this script does add a lot to the server load. So I wanted to see how we performed without it, the results were not good. Search engine traffic dropped a lot after checking stats on it etc we made the decision to add it back. The site is hosted on a much more powerful server with a highly respect company so I dont forsee any problems with it.
From a members point of view, the only difference you will see is the page urls changing to html. Normal urls like forum/showthread.php?t=x or whatever still work but you will instead see html urls. The only minor problem with this is that if for any reason the script is ever removed, references to other thf threads will be incorrect. A very very minor inconvenience but I thought Id mention it.
THF Credits
You all have Cowboy to thank for this one
The credits plugin is a fantastic little script which gives all members credits for being active on THF. You get credits for posting, referring members, starting threads etc. You can see how many credits you have
here. This info can also be seen at the top of the page and in your posts.
We will be explaining how the credits work soon but for now, I just wanted you guys to know about it
We can change the term credits to 'THF dollars', 'chips' or whatever. Its up to you guys
Once we see how the plugin works in practice, we will be using the credit system to reward active members with games etc
Let us know if anything is wrong
As with all upgrades, sometimes some things mess up. It looks as if everything is fine but I've added 2 plugins and did 2 script updates so theres definately a chance something has messed up somewhere along the way so if you find a problem post it here and I'll look into it
Thanks
Kevin
Some upgrades to THF 
Asteroids
