💿 Software Update for HNZ!

[Nicolas King]

WE'RE BACK! ​

Thanks for your patience this morning as the site was offline for some maintenance and upgrades!

We're happy to report all the upgrades we wanted to undergo were successful and happened quicker than we hoped!

This upgrade includes features such as: post bookmarks, post reactions, conversation sorting, and full emoji support for the board - as well as a few other tweaks and changes. Some of these were part of a core software update from Xenforo, and others we bundled with this upgrade to save future downtime.
You can read all about the new features in this handy FAQ post.

One other minor change of note is that we've updated all user's watch settings to not watch topics/forums with new emails by default. (We're trying not to be flagged as spam by mail services as much!) You can opt back in to receiving emails by default in your account preferences - we mostly just wanted to opt out the thousands of inactive accounts we brought over from ZetaBoards!

Enjoy the new features, if you spot something new worth sharing mention it in Let's Learn Together, and thanks for enjoying HNZ in all the ways you do!

All the best,

Nick
(On behalf of the HNZ Site Staff)

 

[Cyndi Kingsley]

Conversation sorting is my fave

 

[Monty Pendleton]

Wheee!! I loove the new post reactions and the round avatars. But man, the bookmarks and conversation folders are going to be so handy, hahaha!!

 

[Elliot Briar]

I love all the updates but I'm also thrilled I can do this now

 

[Jodie Wedd]

Can we ditch the round avatars? They look extremely out of place. Not a fan at all.

 

[Selene Le Fey]

Can we ditch the round avatars? They look extremely out of place. Not a fan at all.

So you are saying you don’t see the point in them?

I am disappointed in you Zach for wasting such a pun opportunity

 

[Syrus Stilinski]

So you are saying you don’t see the point in them?

I am disappointed in you Zach for wasting such a pun opportunity

Hufflepuff for you!

 

[Liam Waldgrave]

I love the updates! Thanks!

 

[Nicolas King]

Can we ditch the round avatars? They look extremely out of place. Not a fan at all.

Always the ray of sunshine there, Zach. ☀

Is it a technical possibility to change them? Yes, it is.
But it came with the software update and, at least right now, a lot of it looks out of place because our avatars were designed to be square originally (see mine as the prime example).
Also, plenty of people actually like them and the design aesthetic is clearly in vogue right now more broadly.
I'll admit I wasn't a fan when I first saw the change on our testing board, but we're going to leave it for a while and see how we all feel later on.

 

[Ainsley Lynch]

I'll admit I'm not the biggest fan of the circles either, and as a graphic maker it's going to make it much harder to crop gifs, since there's no way to know how they'll actually look on the site other than trial and error. I'm not looking forward to testing the gifs I've spent the last IC year making for next IC year to see which ones need to be recropped. I know it's the style right now, and I'm open to see if they grow on me, but personally they don't look right to me in the context of a forum, and I don't think they're the best fit for a site that uses gifs as avs so heavily.

(I'm a big fan of the other changes in this update though, if my sidebar didn't make it clear )

 

[Samuel Phillips]

These updates are awesome!! Circle avatars have been popular on tumblr for a little while and I think it will be fun at least to play around in photoshop and see how these avs could look with round borders since that's what I'm used to The reactions are by far the coolest thing, though

 

[Sarah Harrington]

Conversation sorting is my fave

I'm waiting to see if my complicated rule system will sort all the in coming exams for me to help with grading at the end.

 

[Cyndi Kingsley]

I'm waiting to see if my complicated rule system will sort all the in coming exams for me to help with grading at the end.

Keep us updated!!

 

[Sarah Harrington]

Keep us updated!!

It's working! I only had one error with my first year rule where I put in exam so a conversation about exams but not an actual exam filtered in, but I've fixed it.

 

[Cyndi Kingsley]

Archived​

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It's time for some new news, so we're archiving this to get it out of the way.

Please make sure to check out the news and updates section for the most up to date site news. If you have any questions about this piece of news, please reach out to an administrator.

~The HNZ Site Staff