The forum is where all our ideas meet and are purified in the fire of opposing opinions, so it is important that it be as useable as possible. I have been working hard at improving the forum recently and the results are up for you to see!

• The RSS fuction "Smartfeed" has been upgraded from verson 2.2.13 to 2.2.17 with lots of bug fixes and generally improved usefulness. The full list of improvements and fixes can be seen here. If you previously subscribed to the RSS feed, you may need to resubscribe.
• Lots and lots of small improvements have been made to the forum code (version 3.0.5 to 3.0.6) to make navigation and overall experience easier and better. The full list of improvements and fixes can be seen here.
• In case you didn't notice, it looks different. A LOT different. The goal was to get away from the old "DarkFantasy" style that looked depressing and move toward a style that is widely supported so future upgrades can be added as soon as they are available. Unfortunately the most supported and well maintained style makes the forum look like a an online medical journal. Soooooo I customized every graphic, color sceme, button, and font to look more like the main site's fantasy wood-and-vines theme. I tried to get the color scheme to be easy on the eyes in every area, but changing one graphic alters several unrelated areas of the forum, so the font contrast vs. background may not be the greatest sometimes. I really hope you like it, but if you don't, you can easily change the style back to the old DarkFantasy style in your User Control Panel.
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• ReCaptcha technology has been added so automated spamming scripts have a much harder time getting on the forum. Check this out for more details.
• Since not all the spam we have been seeing comes from automated scripts, I also integrated the forum with the StopForumSpam website. If the user has spammed any other forums before he came here (pretty likely) then he is instantly and automatically banned. In the unlikely event the spammer chose to spam our forum before anyone else, he can be banned with a single click, which also reports him to the StopForumSpam database, effectively blacklisting him from other forums instantly.
• I have created a new section of the forum called The Vault. All old posts that are no longer relevant, or posts that no one is posting on anymore, will be moved to The Vault. This should help reduce clutter and keep the topics fresh while still allowing you to find old posts and search through the archived topics. I am moving all posts older than June 2009 to the Vault. As of this post, I have only moved the old stuff from about 20% of the forum. If you would like to continue discussing a topic that has been moved to the Vault, just send me a message via PM and it can be easily restored to it's original locaiton.

These improvements are also announced in the News section of the main site. If you have some improvements to suggest or questions to ask, please do so. I will do my best to accomodate you or answer your questions.