The forums were updated recently, and with that update came some new features.
Friends/Contacts
This replaces the Buddy List from the previous version. You can add another member as a Contact via the Contacts & Friends link in your User CP or via the Friends box on their profile page. You can also choose to send a request to befriend that member. If they accept, you'll show up in the Friends box in each other's profiles. On the list of members online, your friends and contacts will have a + by their names.
Your User CP has a new option for private messages (accessed from the Edit Options link), where you can elect to receive PMs only from friends and contacts (as well as moderators and admins) rather than being able to receive PMs from the entire membership.
Visitor Messages
You now have the option to post messages to other members on their profile page and to let other members post on your profile page, and you can respond to their messages on your profile page. You can edit messages that you've left on your own profile page but not messages that you've left for other members; also, you can delete messages left by yourself or others on your profile page.
Please remember that visitor messages are public and can be read by any member looking at the profile page where you've left the message. The forum rules about appropriate content, copyright, and spam also apply to visitor messages.
You can leave messages either by posting directly into the box or by clicking the Send Message link under the member's username on the profile page. The Send Message link is a drop-down menu for sending private messages, visitor messages, and e-mails. Since visitor messages are public, it's important not to confuse the Private Message and Visitor Message options in the drop-down menu. If you leave a public visitor message by mistake when you meant to send a PM, you can contact the recipient of the message or any member of the mod team and ask them to delete it.
If you don't wish to have visitor messages on your profile, or if you only want to receive them from your friends and contacts, you can do this at your User CP (via the Edit Options link - the options for visitor messages are right under the ones for PMs).
Social Groups
This feature allows members to create groups where people with similar interests can chat among themselves. The groups can be public, in which case anyone can join and the messages are visible to anyone; invitation-only, in which case you have to be invited to join and the messages are visible only to group members, moderators, and admins; or moderated, in which case you have to apply for membership to a public group and the creator of the group has to approve your membership. Anyone can start a group, and the topic doesn't have to be royalty related although it can be. So this is an opportunity for fans of a particular princess to get together to chat about her without being interrupted by haters of said princess, and it's an opportunity for the people who want to sit and tell each other how hot Pierre Casiraghi is to indulge their hormones to their hearts' content without getting into trouble for writing empty posts. The groups can also be used by people with similar non-royal interests and experiences to chat about a particular topic, and they can be used as support groups by people who want to chat in private but prefer the format of a forum rather than PMs.
You can see a list of groups in the Quick Links drop-down menu at the top of the page and also in your User CP, under Networking -> Social Groups. Under the list of groups is a link where you can create a group of your own. You can join a group by visiting the group and clicking the Join Group link at the top right.
Unlike threads, there's no subscription option for the groups, so you'll have to check from time to time to see if anyone has added messages; you won't be receiving e-mail notification of contributions to groups where you're a member. The social groups don't have a lot of features yet, and we'll probably see more features and functionality being added with later upgrades of the software.
The forum rules generally also apply to group message content. We're applying the no-bashing and no-fighting rule, the rule about obscene and vulgar content, and the copyright rule on posting of photos; the same criteria being used in the Ask BeatrixFan thread for medical and legal advice (i.e., please be careful about asking for help or advice on these topics since they're subjects where you should be consulting professionals) also apply to the groups. For most groups we're applying the English-only rule; however, groups for members from a particular country or region can include messages in that language. We prefer for foreign-language groups to have a moderator as a member, but as long as we don't get any complaints about the content, there shouldn't be any problems. For the moment we're allowing groups on religious and political topics, but if we start getting complaints about them, we might have to reconsider that decision. So go ahead and start up a group on a topic of interest, and enjoy!
Albums
Although this version of the forum software includes the ability to have photo albums on profile pages as you probably know if you're a member of other vbulletin forums, we've decided not to enable this option. We can't take the risk of having members fill their albums with copyrighted photos of their favourite royals and landing us in legal trouble with photographers and photo agencies.
Tagging
This version of the software allows tags (short descriptions of the thread topic) to be added to the threads by the thread starter and the moderation team. The list of tags for each thread can be found in a box below the thread. Each tag is a link which, when clicked, leads to a list of other threads with the same tag, making it a very easy way to find related threads anywhere in the forum.
If you click the "Tags" link at the top of the box containing the tags, you'll be taken to a page that contains a "tag cloud": a list of the most popular tags, with the words in different sizes depending on the popularity of the tags.
The Search feature has been expanded to include a tag search. When you click on Tag Search in the drop-down menu, you're taken to a page with a search box; this page also contains the tag cloud. For good measure, the tag cloud also appears at the bottom of the Advanced Search page.
