Friday, February 17, 2006

About Our New Board

The Cauldron has new message board, located athttp://www.ecauldron.net/mb/. We apologize for the problems this move will cause our members, but Bob's new server ran the 0.6 branch of the Beehive Forums software (the code that that runs our board) very slowly. Testing showed that the old 0.5 branch was much faster. Unfortunately, there is no way to turn a 0.6 branch board into a 0.5 branch board, so we had to start over. Our original board will hopefully re-appear in a read-only format in a week or two so the 180,000+ messages now there will be available for reference.

This means everyone will have to create a new account (if you had an account on our old board, please see "Important Re-Registration Information" below for important instructions), recreate their sig and profile, etc. We apologize, but there was no way to avoid it. However, we have taken advantage of having to restart to reorganize the board. The Cauldron now has two separate forums (TCMAIN and TCSOCIAL) and our folders are split between them.

This gives us room for more folders with less confusion. The social side of TC has benefited from this the most as we now have a number of folders to be social in instead of having to cram everything not a religious dicussion into 3-4 folders.

You can move between the two forums either via the link to the "other" forum in the top (white) bar or via the "Forums" item in the top menu bar. Note that the numbers listed for messages and last visits in the "Forums" item are not always accurate (nor are the numbers the "Stats" panel in the second forum -- found at the bottom of the message pain) due to bugs in the 0.5 branch code that were never fixed by the Beehive team.

Other Major changes:

"Settings" (in the top menu) is where you go to modify your personal settings (nickname, email address, forum options, etc.). This was called "My Controls" in the original board.

"PMs" in the top menu will take you to your PM Inbox where you can read and send personal messages.

"Chat" in the top menu will bring up our Flash Chat area, log in with your message board User ID and password. Note that's your user id, not your nickname.

"Rules" on the top menu will bring up a section with all of our forum and chat rules and some FAQs that might prove helpful

"Extras" on the top menu will bring up a lot of "extra" features, some examples: a links section, information on our MUX (CauldronMUX), etc.

One Request: Messages cannot be moved between forums like they can between folders, so it is important to put discussions in the proper forum. We don't want to be thread nazis, but we will be enforcing this.

Important Re-Registration Information

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you had an account on our old board, you will need to follow this procedure to successfully log in to our new board:

1) Close your browser -- all copies of your browser. Then reopen it.

2) Go to the New Board: (http://www.ecauldron.net/mb/). Note that your username and password will probably be in the logon box. If they are, ignore them as you are not really "there" until you register. Click on the Register link and register -- using the same username and password you use on this board. (Or a completely different username, although this will confuse people -- just don't use the same username as the old board with a different password). Be sure to use a working email address that you get email from.

3) When you finish, you should be logged in (You'll see a top menu with "Logout" instead of "Login" if you are). Log out completely. Try to log back in. You should be able to. If you get some type of "Session" or other weird error, close your browser down, go directly to the new board and try again.

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