I thought it might be nice to know what people are looking for, so I compiled a list of the most popular search terms so far for the month of March.

Just created the new "Master Skinners Lounge" category.   This is a private library for anyone who has the access level of Master Skinner or higher.  So if you wish to discuss something among Master Skinners and admins but not have it seen by the public, this is the place for that!

Enjoy!

Just did a minor update to the forums.  When using the Facebook Share information, the Share Description will now update the PreviewText.  If the Share Description is not used, it will continue to take the first 300 characters of the post for the preview text.

Article View: Creates a clean view of the post to link to without comments and other screen clutter.  It will use the main sites article page (Canonical URL) if the category is configured for that.  IE: Star Control News would link back to the StarControl/Article page.  Otherwise it will use the articleview mode in the forums.

Unhide Link:  Use this link when you need to send the article to Press/Journalist or other VIP's before the post has been made visible to the public.  This option is only available when the post is marked as hidden.  It will unhide the post and show the article view of it too.

Adding a new feature that allows moderators and admins to schedule a post to automatically change a post from Hidden to Visible at the time specified in the Creation Date field.  This way you do not have to always remember to manually release a journal or post at a specified time.  

I did a little work today on the Email notification system for subscribed posts that get new replies.  It should start sending emails again.  Let me know if you feel like you are getting bombarded with emails and I will tweak the system.

Have some new features ready for testing on http://forumsbeta.stardock.com 

1. New Stardock Admin category
2. Upload Images with new posts and replies.
3. Autosave 

Here are some important notes about the following features.

1. Image uploads
   1. Max file size is 5MB
   2. Image Resizing: If you resize an image within the text editor, the physical image size will remain the original size and only be adjusted by html/css
      1. if you resize the image via the Image Editor tool, it will change the physical size of the file.
   3. Access: Currently only access levels 5 through 9 (Masters on up) will have access to Image Upload features.  This may change in the near future.
   4. Abandoned images.  Images are uploaded immediately, if you delete the image from your post before saving your post, it is still uploaded to the server but not assigned to any image.  Or never save your post.  This is an abandoned image.  Currently there is a rule that will only allow you to have 30 abandoned images,  this is to help prevent spammers from abusing image upload capabilities.  There will be a job to clean up abandoned images but that is still a work in progress.
2. Autosave 
   1. Access: Currently access levels 2 and up have access to the AutoSave feature.
   2. Autosaves every 30 seconds.  We can change that to be faster if needed.
   3. Autosave is based on the URL and Browser.  So if you are posting in to Category X where the URL = http://forumsbeta.stardock.com/newpost/forum/{X}  and you navigate away and go to a new category Y, http://forumsbeta.stardock.com/newpost/forum/{Y}  you will not be able to restore your last draft from category X when on the URL for category Y.  You would need to return to the original url to restore your draft.  Or if you read the next page of a post that will change the URL. And if you change browsers or computers then the draft will not be available.

If testing goes well I hope to push these changes into production next Tuesday.

Hi All,

For those of you who do not know me, I'm a developer here at Stardock.  Actually one of the original developers of WinCustomize.com.  

As you have seen, WinCustomize has not had many updates recently.  So, I'm looking to try and clean things up a little bit here. Starting out by fixing a few things.  So, I'm asking you, what issues on WinCustomize have really been bugging you that you would like to have fixed?

For those of you that have been around for awhile, you will notice a few changes to our forums.  We have enhanced our searching capabilities as well as added a new Subscribe feature which will be discussed shortly.  And you will also notice a few cosmetic changes too.

Here is a quick overview of the new features.  Enjoy!

New search engine and options menu moved.

Search in categories

Search in a thread and new button bars.

Additional Search Options and Results

New Subscription feature to watch posts you are interested in.

Subscribe options when creating a new post.

Subscribe options on Reply Form.

Auto Subscribe option.

Subscriptions page features.

Modify subscription options

Thats all folks.