Just to let you know about some things that will be coming along in the next month or so. Hopefully by Christmas but might be a New Year thing! I hope it will make your experience here even better. That sounded a little American... sorry!

Reciprocal Friendships Between Users

As part of our new social networking system, you will be able to request that people on your buddy list confirm their friendship, after which time a person's list of confirmed friends will be viewable to other users.

Public Messaging

Private messaging between users has been around for yonks! The next step is the public messaging system, allowing users to communicate publicly via their profile pages.

User Picture Galleries

This will replace the Pic Store implemented today.

You will be able to view albums and pictures can be limited by the user to just board staff and people on their buddy list if they want privacy. Or everyone or just users, etc.

User-Created Social Groups

To further social cohesion between us all and to encourage people to make friends, we will be including a facility to allow users to create their own social/interest groups.

These groups are enhanced by having their own public messaging system, and the ability to add pictures to the group from your albums.

New Member Profile Page

Because so much is changing the member profile page will be completely changed.

The new page will present information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface.

Individual profile field categories can be displayed alone in blocks in the right column, in addition to appearing by default in the 'About Me' tab.

Customisation of Profile Page

Users will have access to the profile page customisation tool, which will allow you to alter fonts, colors, background and borders etc. of your profile page in order to create a more personal look.

Small warning.. nobody wants to see some of those really ugly MySpace pages on GC!!

Attachment Viewing Lightbox

Clicking on an attached image will open a lightbox rather than open a new window, with the image scaled to fit the browser. A click on the image in the lightbox will open it in a new window as before.

And other bits and bobs will be added too.

All of that is coming to GC soon!

Mods - we are getting some things too.. extra spam control, inline spam control and moderation improvements and other bits and bobs.