Forum vBullletin Upgrade and New Shoutbox

[mysterio]

As most of you had noticed around a month ago, the forum was experiencing some issues like slow loading and random but frequent double posting. Our IT team was hard at work trying to resolve these aforementioned issues and as part of the resolution was to upgrade the forum's vBulletin engine.

On a related note, as part of the upgrade some of you will have noticed the change in the chatbox, which was actually replaced by the shoutbox plug-in from vBulletin. You may be confused or not even like its appearance as it is configured at default settings. Fortunately there is a way to alter the appearance of the shoutbox. Please click your Settings and on the left side you will see a new section named Shoutbox, under which is Shoutbox Settings. From there you can configure several parameters of the shoutbox, primarily its appearance. For example, by default the typing area (called the "Shout Area") of the shoutbox is a large box at the left side (the size of the Shout Area when at the left or right side is affected by the size of the Shoutbox itself). If you want the appearance like the old chatbox, change the setting "Shout Area Location:" from Use Forum Default to Below Shouts. Remember to click Save Changes after you're done. The change will appear when the page containing the shoutbox is refreshed.

So now, now only is the forum is visibly snappier and the double posting issue has disappeared (I can attest to both personally especially the latter as I've had to edit my posts many times to remove the double posting [It's an OCD thing ]), we also have a spanking new (and customizable) shoutbox. Please join me in thanking our IT team led by @AnthonyG on behalf of the forum staff and the members for a job well done.

[mysterio]

Our IT team under @AnthonyG has made a workaround regarding the concern of new posts disappearing from the New Posts list when you've read it. When you click new posts for the first time, you will see this notice. If you forgot to take note of it, here it is:

4.2.5 has removed the obsolete thread marking option to mark read by cookies.
It now marks threads read the correct way, which is database marking.

"New Posts" is ONLY supposed to show you threads with unread posts - otherwise they are not "New". Once read, they disappear from the list.

If you want to see all updated threads from the past 24 hours, use Today's Posts, which lists unread in bold and read in normal text.