Forum Update v1.5.3041.17461

Version v1.5.3041.17461 of the forums was published today.

While a lot of users are seeing periodic slowdowns on the forums, they remain faster than previous builds. This build should help to improve that. Our improvements to speed and functionality seem to be accompanied by an equal, and sometimes greater, increase in traffic. Stardock is growing by leaps and bounds this year, with no end in sight. We're still working towards a 0% slowdown, but it's a hard-fought battle.

• Announcement System - Admins can now post system-wide announcements which will appear at the top of every forum in the Stardock Network.
• Karma System - ('Thumbs Up' button in posts)
• Reporting System - Reporting system was added back in today. This system will undergo continual updates to improve it.
• Performance Updates - Changed a lot of data fetch and binding methods to execute asynchronously. Forum lists, Posts and the forum index.
• Several Administrative Updates.
• General Layout/Visual fixes.
• Improvements to the 'Get Last' or 'Last Read' autoforwarding. 
• Addition of /get;### to post urls to forward user to exact reply on exact page of post. The 'Reply #X' labels on replies are now links using that format.
  

It's important to note that the lifecycle of IE6 support is drawing closer and closer to an end with every month that passes. While we'll always make sure the forums work with IE6, you'll likely start to notice that IE6 appears differently than IE7/8, Firefox and Opera. Our IE6 statistics are starting to get down to the point where Safari is overtaking it's percentage of users, on some of our websites. Opera support, visually, continues to be an uphill battle. We'll comment on this further when it's relevant. Please don't ask any followup questions about IE6. (This bit is, as most of my update posts are, purely informational)

(Just a friendly reminder; Forum Update posts will be moderated with an iron fist. Please do not reply with feature requests or ask when/if features will be available or when/if bugs will be fixed. Thanks)