Dear SketchUp friends,

We want to tell you about some exciting news we have for you. We have worked very hard for you these past four weeks in preparing a new forums board for you. This new board has added security, increased stability and a myriad of new functionality.

Why a new board?

As I said above, there is added security and increased stability. These things are necessary as we have been hacked a few times now. When we have the forum was either down or not operating to acceptable standards. Of course this is something we don't accept and thus we have created this new place for you.

Has anything changed?

In principle no, you will still have the same forums as before. We did however apply some tweaks and we now have a more compact board index, allowing you to view where new posts are at a glance.

What about new features?

Some of the new features are:

Subforums are now lit to show if there are new posts (this also allowed us to condense the index).
The interface and board theme have been streamlined and use the classic SketchUp.com old forum Blue look.
We have all-new icons to mark the different kinds of topics and forums.
And there are more things which you will notice once you start using the new board.

What happens to my old posts?

Fear not! We have taken every precaution to move your old posts to the new board.
Contrary to most upgrades however, the current forum board (not the new one) is Beta software. We don't want to flood you with too much technical information, what it basically comes down to is that the old posts on the old board have to be manually transferred to the new board. This can not be done by an automated process - the contents of every single post have to be copied and pasted one by one into a new post on the new board. You can imagine this is a tremendous task as there are nearly 30,000 posts on this board. However, we have already moved a few thousand of them and we are not stopping until all are transferred. We've all put an enormous effort into this, because we feel that the history made here should be preserved and we know from experience that keeping workable links to old topics is a must-have for any community.
There is only one caveat: we are moving these posts using a temporary transfer forum. This basically means that the old posts are copied to a forum in the new board that is hidden from view. Why have we done this? Because we cannot assign the rightful author of the post if that author has not registered on the new board. And for this very reason we ask that you sign up there as soon as possible, so we can assign your posts and those of whom replied in the topics to which you posted, so that we can then move the topics to the open (unhidden) forums.

What cannot be transferred?

The original post date and time of the posts due to the manual move can not be trasnferred. However we will try to keep the order of the topics as they are now in this forum.
Also, for a while - until the transfer is over - the 'view new posts' and 'View active topics' will be useless due to the tremendous amount of newly transfered topics and posts. Therefore we kindly ask you to bookmark the topics you are currently active (or interested in) at the new forums for a while in order to easily find them.

What e-mail address do I register with?

We ask that you register with the same e-mail address AND with the same username you use in this old board. For the time being, user activation at the new board will be carried out by the admins. This is where we also need your patience; every account needs to be checked and activated individually. Note that as we activate accounts the notifications for those activations may only be sent hours later. Meaning your account may be activated much sooner than you receive confirmation of by e-mail.
Though not necessary, it would make our jobs easier if you also maintain your use of capitals in your username.
The reason for this is that we want to prevent other people from being assigned to your posts.

Gaieus wrote:
Also (because the big "rush") we suspended activation at all (that was after this original announcement) so registering members need not wait for the activation email at all now (for the time being).

Just register - and the rest is ours...


Where do I start new topics?

We ask that you start new topics in the new board, but if you want to continue open topics in the old board then you have plenty of time to do so. It's just that we ask you to not start new topics in the old board so that we can use the new board as soon as possible (and subsequently don't have to continue still-open topics from the old board into the new one).
At some point in time we will turn off the ability to start new topics in the forums here, but maintain replying to current topics.

What about the current board?
This board will close at some point in time, however we do not want to push people. If more time is needed then we will extend that time. However we don't want new registrations at this old board so we will turn registrations off starting today. We therefore ask that you register at the new board as soon as possible. The sooner you register and start posting there the faster we can make the transfer complete. We really need your help with this and it only takes one minute to do (see bottom of this post for the URL).

Questions?

If you have a question please post it below. We will attend as fast as possible.

In closing

We really want to make this transfer as smooth as possible for you guys and we have taken every measure to make that possible. But we need your help! Although we are not forcing people to use the new board immediately we do ask that you make the switch at some point. For a while there will be two boards to check topics at, but as the ability to start new topics at the old board will be turned off at some point this forum will slow down eventually and the new board will take it from there.

Don't worry. The SCF is not dying, we are upgrading!.

Thanks as always for your continued support and see you at the new board!

The new board can be found here:

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf