now be honest, if you are reading this but came to the forum in the last hour while I set this up and the board was disabled: did you think I may have taken the money & ran?
I bought this before the begathon but it took a bit longer to implement than I expected. I meant to have it up and running in time to announce it with the renewal but y'all were FAST with this begathon and got ahead of my ability to make this happen concurrently. All the same, it's here now
introducing a more social-media-ish enhancement/feature.
your profiles have now become a more prominent feature on the site.
you can set up your own profile header in your user options directly. you now have the option to follow users, and get a custom timeline in your profile to show you just those users threads and posts. you can now write directly to a user on their profile and have it appear there. you can now use hashtags ( # ) and mentions (@) to keep track of information or inform each other better. there are more features and I'd recommend you go through it and familiarize yourself with it a bit.
from within a thread, or by hovering over a user name, you can add any member to your follows and keep track of their posts going forward. underneath your avatar in your posts, there's also a new icon to mention that user directly in the quick reply.
NOTE: there is an autofill available when using @ but it's not working properly (part of the problem I've been having getting this running) but you can always use [ mention ] tag directly, or there's a MENTION button on the editor that adds it directly for you. So long as you get the username correctly, they will be notified and it'll be on their wall as well.
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I hope this quality of life improvement and new feature make this place more customizable to your likes and needs and a more frequent mainstay of your daily browsing habits
this was part of my surprise alongside the 4-years (and there's another new feature that I'm going to implement to replace the ranks, but that'll take me a bit longer to make happen, so since we have January surprises covered, let's leave it for February...) as always, a pleasure to make this community a little bit better each time <3
for everything
Modnitta 
it’s so nice to see you around again 
