New TSG Forum Design – Mobile, Facebook, Twitter and more!

As some of you may have noticed we've gotten around to upgrading our forum to the latest Invision Board which includes a complete overhaul of how the forum works and looks. While its still a work in progress getting it to work properly there are a bunch of great new features such as automatic mobile browsing from iphones, blackberries and other mobile smart devices as shown in the picture above with a simple lo fi theme.

Also included in the new forum are many social features like Twitter and Facebook. While you can definitely tweet and share posts and images now from the forum on Twitter and Facebook you can also login with your Twitter or Facebook account (if you are not already a TSG Member). This allows you to post on TSG without having a TSG account and sync your status, tweets and wall posts with forum and respective accounts.

If you are a TSG member already, you can also associate your existing forum account with Twitter and/or Facebook account by going into your My Settings > Profile > Manage Facebook Connect or Manage Twitter Connect. As you can see in the image below you can sync quite a few features besides tweets and wall posts including your avatar and profiles as well.

Another feature is now the use of threaded personal conversations whereas in the past, every PM message regardless of whether it was a reply to the same subject came in a separate PM. Now conversations keep all those messages in one thread for easy management.

Users can update other users on what they're doing right now. Updates appear in that user's profile, in a block on the board homepage, and in the new Status feed. Plus, status updates can now be replied to and there's the Twitter and Facebook integration mentioned above.

Central notifications is another new feature. Users can receive notifications (via a board popup or email) of events that are important to them, such as new personal conversations, status updates made by friends, or one of their posts being quoted.

This is definitely a big step up from the previous forum version and there are sure to be bugs and issues so thanks for being patient as we work them out.  Feel free to explore and try any of the interesting features on the new board!