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[Tinytimrob]

Welcome to Ginever.net!
It is with great pleasure that I am now able to open the brand new Ginever Service Alliance website, Ginever.net 4.0, for testing! The new website is powered by Invision Power Board 3.2, which has been kindly licensed to us by Invision Power Services.

Here's a list of a few of the major overhauls:
- We have faster, lower cost nameservers, which should help to bring a better browsing experience to all users.
- The account system has been completely redesigned, which should hopefully make things much easier for you.
- A new donation system is now in place, which will help to fund the increasing costs of the Alliance.
- The forum navigation has been improved, helping to reduce wasted screen space.
- IPv6 is now supported by the software, helping to make us ready for the 'IPv6 apocalypse'.
- We have a new post editor powered by CKEditor, which should make writing posts easier.
- As you are writing a post, your entry is now automatically saved every few minutes. If you are writing a long post, and accidentally crash your web browser or lose the posting form for some reason, you will (in most cases) now be able to recover your half-written post (or at least a large portion of it) and continue working.
- New posts will now automatically appear without having to reload the page.
- The avatar/photo mess has been sorted. There is now a single profile picture for each user, which is displayed across the entire site.
- Numerous speed and performance improvements.
- A new achievements system has been hand-coded. It sucks slightly less than the old one.
- Private conversations (PMs) will no longer spam up your notification drop-down box.
- All of the old content will be moved into an archive. Important stuff will, of course, be copied to the new site. For content that has been re-uploaded to the new server, Apache mod_rewrite will be used to redirect old links in order to keep them valid. The transition of important content is currently in progress; please don't try to do it yourself unless instructed.

Wordpress, GineverWiki, and GANG have been moved to the new server and upgraded to work with GineverAccount 4.0. As a result of this upgrade, the wiki contains a lot of outdated information, so that needs to be worked on at some point.

Registering your new account:
All users will need to register again (except Paulicus25 and Medessec, who have already done this). Registrations are being manually processed in a specific order, so it may take a few days to get you up and running. While you are registering, you will be able to change the details of your account in whatever fashion you choose.

The new Terms of Use have not yet been finalised or agreed. Until they are, the registration form will show the IP.Board default TOU (which are incorrect), and both Ginever.net and GineverAccount 4.0 will officially be operating under the old TGBv3 Terms of Use, which can be found at http://www.thegineve...and-ginevernet/. Users will be made aware of this as their registrations get processed. Unrestricted registration will not become available until the new Terms of Use have been sorted.

Display resolution:
The new site has been designed to work best on displays with a resolution of 1280x800 or higher. People on displays smaller than this (such as netbook users) who find the new forum index cramped should try closing the sidebar. Most desktop computers should be capable of at least a 1280x1024 screen resolution (we had a screen from 1996 which was capable of that), and most laptops will be capable of at least 1280x800, so I don't see this being a big issue.

Reporting bugs:
The bug tracker has not yet been updated to work with the new site. Until it is working, any problems you encounter should be reported in the Help Board for Ginever.net and GineverAccount 4.0.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter and I hope you enjoy using the new site!

Rob

[Tinytimrob]

The site will be opening to the public on Tuesday 9 August. Between now and then, I encourage everyone to post as many new topics as they possibly can!