Everything looks different. What's changed round here?

This site has just been upgraded! It means a more stable and secure platform for the site to work on, and more scope to make improvements in the future. It also means some things have changed. There may be some problems, which we're hoping to tidy up soon.

The following items are now changed.

• The Dashboard is now simply a pair of links in the sidebar. Use Create Content to make a new story or art piece. Use My drafts and queue to see your queued items. You'll notice that you can treat art and stories separately now, too.
• New profile choices - Set your local timezone so the system can present stuff in your local time. You also have new options about your profile, including avatars and other info to be displayed on your author page and the sidebar of any of your stories (like this one!) You can even set up a contact form so that people can send you messages on the site.
• 'Post Action/What would you like to do with this item?' is now known as The Queue, and features some different options: draft, ready for publishing, returned, and safe edit. Safe edit is a new status you can use to make an edit without having to remove your story from the site.
• Teasers are now part of the content of your story. It will either be the first 600 characters of your post, or you can set your own teaser up by putting the teaser at the top and using the teaser button on the editing toolbar.
• User list - The user list is back, yay! Click a user's name to see their info. The ‘Tracker’ tab on a user’s page shows you all their stuff. All users are listed, even if they’ve never posted a fic or piece of art.
• Viewing category pages - Browsing categories is now kind of like search as well. When viewing a category page for something like ‘Female Revan’ you can click ‘Romances’ there in the sidebar to get all the stories about a female Revan, of any alignment, which are romances.
• Comments - You can now give your comments a title. Additionally, you can reply directly to someone's comment, instead of just sticking it at the bottom.
• Single account - We are about to roll the forums into this new system, which means you no will longer need two separate accounts for the forums and the Dashboard. We anticipate doing this really soon!
• Better handling of edits - You no longer need to remove your item from the site for a revision — people can continue reading the old version of the item while the revised version sits in the queue. The revised version will take over once it’s been approved. Too easy!
• Fancy buttons on the editing gizmo - When you create or edit an item you’ll find that the editor has style buttons and stuff now too. You can also resize the area to see more or less stuff according to your prference. Snazzy! The editor also uses the current page template so you can see exactly how it will appear in context.
• Polls - We can now use polls for voting on stuff. Votes are tallied and revealed to the admins so that we can see who may be responsible for playing silly buggers with the voting. You can also change your vote if you change your mind.

The following features have been removed or significantly altered and will not have been carried over since the upgrade.

• Old forum posts will soon be gone. The new forums will be on a blank slate at this stage, though the old posts will still be archived and available. The JJT games can come back to the regular forums now, too.

• Pagination You no longer need to bust out your stories into multiple pages. That doesn't make it OK for you to submit a 25,000 word chapter, though.

• Thumbs up - Thumbs up did not come over. The biggest reason for this is that it’s a grotty hack that was always held together with spit and rubber bands, and does not play well with the importer we used to come into this new system. We will use polls for contest voting now.

• BBCode in postings - BBCode is no longer required for posting stories (it is still being supported for the forums, and any old content using BBCode will still keep its formatting, but it’s not needed in the future). Please don't use it anymore! Since the buttons are right there and the styling shows you what it looks like immediately, we figure people won’t miss it heaps.

• HTML Importer - Did anyone even use that thing?

• Image hosting - We will no longer be hosting people’s pictures for them. imageshack and other places are free, and are really great. We will keep old pictures so that no one’s posts get stuffed up.