First things first, a very happy new year and welcome to 2022 - I’m hoping this is a happy and fruitful year for everyone!
Rules Update
The rules page has been updated to include a small request to check for tag/forum specific requests (requests, not rules!) and fix a typo that encouraged spam rather than asked you not to post it
Updated Core
We make use of the excellent open source forum platform, Flarum and they recently released the 1.2 update and we jumped on it as soon as we could, in terms of new features nothing much for existing users but new users will now be prompted for a nickname on sign up removing that additional step we had in place. If you want more information on this specific release see this post on Flarum discuss.
Behind the Scenes - PHP 8 PHP 8.1
We jumped to PHP early on in the year with a simple FPM setup, however since then we have crossed over to PHP 8.1 and now use a dedicated FPM package served by Apache (words!) so should be a little less iffy but also may introduced some unwanted issues, if you see such issues… let us know!
Around the Scenes - Social Profiles
You can now add social profile information to your profile, this is limited to those that are in the Contributor membership level, just so we are clear, you get into this membership level by posting, replying, liking and getting likes it’s easy and free, always will be (and fun because you share aka contribute
Keyboard Shortcuts!
While I was hoping we would be done with adding new extensions along comes a new one that just does something so simple but so much needed and does it well too .. so keyboard shortcuts are now a thing on the site, you can perform multiple actions and they should not take effect while writing a topic or response. To see the list of actions you can perform press h to open up the help screen, very simple and effective!?
So I normally compile these posts at the same time I create the posts in contributor (features added go into contributor tag and if they suck, end up broken we just remove them) then get announced here as a larger post at the end of the month... sadly I forgot the date so Jan's update is 2 days late
