Between work and the commute to work, I usually only have a couple hours a day to myself, so bear with me if I seem like I've been lazy on here. Trust me, I haven't. I've been working on a slew of updates for TE that I'm so very close to completing. The only problem is my limited window in each day to work on these things, which is quite frustrating considering how little work I actually have left.

After some of our regulars decided to bail on us for no good reason, I've been promising that I'd do my best to improve the TE experience with new, more robust functionality, and I'm in the mood to ramble on about these things.


One thing I've been doing these past few days is restructuring the board system. Originally, a post could only be on one board, like most forums do. However, posts get lost in the sea of under-utilized boards, so after a while, I changed it up so a post could be on two boards. It seemed okay for a while, but the same lack of exposure befell posts again, and so I'm changing it up again. You'll soon be able to tag a post under as many boards as you want, and it'll automatically categorize them appropriately.

Say for example, you post a topic on the "Halloween" 1978 board. Your post will also be filed under the boards for Movies, Horror, and Thrillers/Suspense automatically. Posts will also be able to be moved to multiple boards just as easily. Therefore, the board index will function much more accurately, too.

Of course, with this added functionality, I have to manually go through about 2000 posts, but I'm halfway there! That's the hard part. Once that's done, I'll update the main forum, the post pages, TEDb, and that shitty FreeForums skin in no time.


Another big update that's taken me a bit longer to wrap my head around is a new dynamic markup editor that wont redirect you off the page, and you'll get live preview results. They call this a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. So if you click the reply button, a box will pop up right under the post and you wont have to worry about [ b ] and [ url=blah blah ] tags, because you'll see the bold text text and the link as you make your post.

Of course, if you're old fashioned, the current way will still be available because I have to make this backwards compatible with all of our existing posts. The same thing goes for when you add or edit posts. You wont be redirected, and you'll see the formatting as you type. I have to do a lot of debugging to make sure I don't screw this up though, but it'll be pretty damn sleek once it's finished.


The home page will also probably be revamped, too. I don't think I'll include the post feed on there, but probably just a Board Index. This means I'll be removing subdomains, but nobody ever uses them anyway. I'll figure out a better use for those later.

Even with my efforts to make things easier for newbies to understand, I know that people will still have trouble with them, so I'm going to make the other skins more accessible, too, and that includes that stupid Facebook skin I've been designing on and off again these past few month. I figure a lot of our reliable users migrated to that shithole, so I might as well cater to them with something they'll recognize visually.

There will be a few more tweaks here and there, such as how you search and sort stuff, but the big changes revolve around the markup editor, the new board system, and the facebook skin. Hopefully, this stuff can be ready in time for the October Challenge, because that's always a big deal.

I really can't wait until I have this stuff all sorted out. Then, I can finally start working on CONTENT! Maybe, if we're lucky, we can lure back a few of our old regulars to this place with these epic redesigns, minimal drama, and high-end low-class trash!