Hello and welcome to our brand new forum! The admin team have worked very hard over the last few months to bring this to fruition, so we really hope you like it. We would like to thank you all again for your patience while we configured the new forum installation.
If you have not logged on in a while, and are wondering what happened to our old forum, please read our announcement on the old forums here: http://thealterbridgenation.com/forumsa ... 13&t=30539
As you take a look around, you will notice a few differences compared to our old forum. The most obvious change is the new visual theme, which uses brand new imagery, and a cleaner fixed-width layout rather than one that stretches to fill the entire browser width. Despite the new look, the forum works identically to our old forum. The forum is built on the same phpBB engine that powered our previous forum, so you will already be very familiar with creating posts, sending PMs, and all of the other core functionality that you are used to.
Aside from the new graphic design, there are a few key changes that you might like to be aware of, the first of which is a slightly altered layout. We have created a brand new Projected subforum, which sits next to the existing Myles Kennedy, Mark Tremonti, and Creed subforums within the Other Bands forum. As described in our announcement last week, we have removed the BCD forum since it got very little use and was irrelevant to the purpose of our website. Finally, some of the forum names and descriptions have been tweaked for clarity's sake.
Another new piece of functionality you might like to know about is the revised YOUTUBE BBcode. To make the use of this button easier for the casual user, we have altered its behavior to accept the short-form YouTube link provided when you press "Share" under any video. For example, let's say you wanted to embed the "White Knuckles" Amsterdam video (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5jKMjLDpWw). On YouTube, you would press the Share button directly below the video:
Highlight the text, and copy it to your clipboard:
Then, simply paste the text between two YOUTUBE tags as follows, and it will embed the video as shown below:
Code: Select all
[YouTube]http://youtu.be/l5jKMjLDpWw[/YouTube]
Other than that, the only notable change is to our set of smileys, which has been reduced to a much cleaner and more manageable library.
We previously announced that we initially do not plan to migrate our banned user list over from the old message board, so anyone will be eligible to sign up for our new forum. We expect that the majority of previously banned users will have done some maturing in the years since their accounts were banned. So, we are giving people the benefit of the doubt as we turn over a new leaf in our website's history.
That said, we will be keeping a close eye out for any users who sign up just to insult people or be a nuisance. We suspect that unfortunately some users may return just to troll, and that will not be tolerated. Any such behavior will be met with swift disciplinary action.
As you familiarize yourselves with the new forum, we also encourage everyone to review our community rules. The rules can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15, or at the top of every subforum.
Finally, we would like to announce Jim as the newest member of our admin team. He has proven to be very helpful during the design of our new forum, and he possesses a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the success of Alter Bridge and our community. We are excited to have him join our team, and we ask you all to join us in welcoming him.
Thanks and happy posting!
- TheAlterBridgeNation.com Admin Team