Hey folks, it's finally here. After two months of work by Fredrik, Garry, Jason, Dirk, and myself, and testing by Jerry and Jorge, we're happy to present you with a fresh new Diplomaticcorp!
A few changes are fairly obvious, most notably: The new appearance. Hopefully something a little warmer and "diplomatic" in the look and feel of the site. The old having been largely unfinished since we went live on it 3 years ago, we hoped to tie everything together with a rich themed ambiance.
But the real changes this spring have come on the interworkings of the dc site...
All the things you're used to finding here are still here - the Open Games, your Profile, the Hall of Games, the Variant Statistics. But what we have now is a fundamentally new messaging system. Since migrating from the Yahoo Groups back in the day, we've never really felt comfortable w the PHPBB installation we had. It got the job done of allowing us to track the explosion of games that we had, but it lacked the community feel and overall experience we want to foster. It had separate logins, separate theme, heck, it felt like an entirely disconnected site. Really, it was.
Now the DC messaging system is built from the ground up as an integral part of dc. All the old posts are migrated over, so your old content is still here - but going forward we have many new benefits:
* Single login!
This one is key, with the forum no longer having a separate login to be able to post or reply to messages. Now when you come to dc, whether you log in each time or use the Remember Me cookie, you can dive right into posts with a single click.
* Subscriptions!
One of the greatest features of the old Yahoo Group was the Daily Digest subscription feature. PHPBB didn't have anything close, so subscriptions died off. Now, you can pick - each forum individually, to receive copies of each new post, or a daily or weekly summary, just like in the old days. Reply to individual posts from your email, and DC can come to you. This should really help our users who cannot get to the site often due to playing from work where gaming sites aren't allowed.
Want to know when someone announces an open variant? Just subscribe to the Open Games forum. Set up your subscriptions under Resources -- My Profile, then
Subscriptions.
* Integrated content!
We can now bridge forum content to other parts of the site, without requiring the framed structure of the old dc.
These are just a few of the key differences - There are many more, so take a moment to look around, explore the new forums,
upload an Avatar, and set up any subscriptions that might help you.
Be sure to bring up any ideas or suggestions here, in the Help & Suggestions forum.
Enjoy!
-mike
