New Features! Upgrading NM to VB 3.7.0

[Rina Touin]

Here are some of the New Features most of you will enjoy , Updates coming soon!

Inline Spam Management and Prevention Tools

Forum spam is an increasing problem for many boards. Unfortunately, due to the visible-source nature of vBulletin and most other forum systems, most preventative measures we might add to the system can simply be reverse-engineered and worked around by persistent spammers.

Therefore, 3.7 contains a new set of tools to help clean up spam and deal with spammers.

Threads and posts can be selected in the usual inline moderation fashion, and then the new 'Delete Threads/Posts as Spam' command can be selected, which will load the spam management interface, which contains options on a single page for removing the spam posts and threads, banning the spammers and finding other spam they may have posted.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

Thread Tagging

A new way to facilitate searching and grouping of threads, it is now possible for users to add tags to threads they post or read.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

Tags can be added when creating a new thread, or to an existing thread by any user (with appropriate permissions).

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

Any users who then click on these tags will not only find all thread that have the same tag as the one clicked, but will also contribute to the building of a search tag cloud, which gives users a quick guide as to what has been searched for recently and most frequently.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

Thread Prefixes

Long requested by users, threads can now have administrator-defined prefixes to their titles.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

Thread prefixes are divided into groups by the administrator, allowing different prefixes to be available in different forums.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

Reciprocal Friendships Between Users

As part of our new social networking system, users can now request that people on their buddy list confirm their friendship, after which time a person's list of confirmed friends will be viewable to other users.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

Public Messaging

While private messages between users have been in vBulletin since version 2.0, vBulletin 3.7 introduces the public messaging system, allowing users to communicate publicly via their profile pages.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

User-Created Social Groups

To further social cohesion between users and to encourage people to make friends, vBulletin now includes a facility to allow users to create their own social/interest groups.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

These groups are enhanced by having their own public messaging system, and the ability to add pictures to the group from user albums.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

New Member Profile Page

In order to accomodate all the new features in vBulletin 3.7, the member profile page has been completely redesigned from the ground up.

The new page presents information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface.

Individual profile field categories can be displayed alone in blocks in the right column, in addition to appearing by default in the 'About Me' tab.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

Member Customization of Profile Page

The administrator may choose to allow his members to use the profile page customization tool, which allows users to alter fonts, colors, background and borders etc. of their profile page in order to create a more personalized look.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

The administrator can lock-down customization permissions, in order to prevent the personalized pages being made too offensively awful by aesthetically challenged members... nobody wants to see some of those really ugly MySpace pages on your vBulletin installation!

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

Inline Editing of Profile Field Values

The 'About Me' tab of each member's profile page has edit controls, allowing them to quickly change values without leaving their profile page.

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Rina Touin]

And More...

There are plenty more new features in vBulletin 3.7.

Here is a brief list of some of the ones we haven't yet touched on:
Visitor tracking on profile pages
Automatic resizing of attached images to match filesize or pixel dimensions
Enhancements to custom bbcode system
Custom icons per forum
Advertisement locations defined in templates
Add multiple moderators in one go through ACP
ATOM support for RSS Poster Robot
Hooks to allow attachments to be passed through a virus scanner
Posts by users in 'Tachy Goes to Coventry' will no longer count towards the total number of posts in a thread or forum. They are now truly hidden!
All AJAX systems now employ the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) for a more consistent and predictable system
YUI files can now be switched from locally hosted to remotely hosted by Yahoo! with a single option change, saving you bandwidthI hope you will be pleased by this.

Until then... ;)