Hey folkses,

I've been working on a bunch of new functionality over the last few days, some of which has been instantly noticed and other stuff which hasn't.

First off, I realised that it's now been over a year since I introduced premium accounts, and the number of renewals has been extremely low (to the point of being non-existent). I put this down to a lack of the site informing people when their account was due to expire/had expired, so I've put a warning message in place that will inform when the premium account a) is due to expire within 30 days, and b) has expired.

In both cases, the warning will hang around until it's dismissed by the user, by clicking a link; it's not going to be annoying and continually get in the way. However, it will appear for all users initially, as everyone was given a premium account for a month (and the way the functionality is set up, it's going to want to notify you that it's now expired). Sorry if that annoys you, but, well, tough

Secondly, as has already been spotted, I added a "Latest tweet" box. I'm aware that some people would prefer it if it were moved further down the screen, and I'm considering it. I'm also considering making it a premium option to be able to reorder the sidebar to your own liking, which might be a nice way of encouraging premium account renewals.

Thirdly, I've added functionality to the Profile page which allows users to see how many posts that person has made on the various messageboards, as well as their most recent comments. I'll be extending this in the near future to add messageboard specific stats (e.g. number of posts in the last day/week/month/year, total posts, top posters, most viewed threads, most commented on threads, etc).


As it's now been two years since the site opened, I'm also going to make another "Where we're at" thread soon, as I did last year, showing traffic graphs from google analytics and discussing how the site's doing.


That's all for now; let me know if you've any questions or comments.

Thanks!
Ben