Couple of New Features

[High on Lullabies]

Hi Everyone,

I've added a couple of new applications:

Profile Privacy

This allows members in all categories to make certain parts of their profile or their entire profile unviewable to most other members. The application offers restrictions to 5 areas:

- Whole Profile

- 'About Me' Section

- 'Contact Information' Section (Except the non-mandatory e-mail address field)

- Profile Feed

- Profile Feed Comments

Each of the above categories can be restricted so it can be seen by:

- Everyone

- Registered Users only; or

- Friends only

In the case of our forum, you have to be a registered (and validated) user to see profiles anyway, so the first two options are basically the same.

To access your settings for this new feature, go to your User Control Panel (that's the menu you access from your username in the black banner at the top of the page) then go to My Settings -> Profile Privacy.

Additionally, to make this new feature more effective, a change has also been made to everyone's profile settings. It was previously the case that the default option was for friend requests to be allowed automatically. It should now be the case that members have to approve anyone who makes a request to become their friend. You can of course change this back if you wish, simply go to: My Settings -> Profile Settings and then go to the Friends section of the screen.

Dead Topic Protection

In order to prevent very old topics in certain forums being resurrected, this feature will automatically prevent members from making posts in topics that have been inactive for a certain amount of time. Initially we propose testing this system in the following forums on topics that have not been posted in for more than 6 months:

- Observations

- Snake Pit

- Support Group

The reason that we have chosen these 3 forums is that we see them as ones which members might post sensitive or personally emotive topics that having been posted at a time, they may well not want being brought up again several months later. The same applies to observations which may have been written about a ex-partner/friend/etc whom they not want to be reminded of for whatever reason.

We hope you'll find these new applications useful, and if you have any feedback or questions about them please don't hesitate to ask!

~HoL