By the time we were ready to convert all the forums to a hybrid format, many people had become accustomed to the UBB way of doing things. The server was still having problems, especially on the weekends, so we still had to move.

The conversion process was therefore halted after only two forums, The Andre Norton Forum and The Lost World Forum, had been converted to the new format.

Because of negative reactions to the new format, we went back to the drawing board and spent over a week redesigning the concept and adding features which had been played but deferred. Our forum users are now able to do use many features they had become accustomed to with the UBB forums:

1) All registered users may now create signature files.

2) All registered users' screen names and password will be remembered by the system.

3) Forum visitors may read all the messages in a thread at one time or they may click on the tree icon displayed beside each thread subject line to bring up a threaded message tree.

4) UBB codes are being honored, and we've provided a link on the posting form to bring up a new browser window with a helpful guide.

5) We are also honoring FuseTalk codes, and have added a couple of custom codes as well.

6) Threads are bumped up to the top of the list as soon as someone adds a new message.

7) Registered users may edit or delete their own messages.

8) Registered users may edit their profiles (which are not currently made public).

9) We've added a selection of smilies that people may use in their messages.

10) The last message number assigned for each thread is displayed in the main forum index, so people can easily see if they've missed a few messages since the last time they visited the forum or refreshed the thread index.

Other changes and new features are on the way, but we have to move all of our remaining forums off the eUniverse server by the end of December. We'll have to defer some of the additional programming work until after the forums have all been moved.

One of the nice features of our new forums is that we are converting all the old, archived messages to the new format as well. Because of changes made to the forums design, the archives for the Andre Norton and Lost World forums will have to be converted again in the future, but visitors can still browse them now.