Hi Everyone -

Well, *one* of the reasons I make it by our own forums so infrequently is all the "back end" things we've been working on to bring you new site features and improvements.

One of those has been an entirely new forum system, which will combine the current forum content with all-new categories, and also roll in what has until now been the entirely separate "comments" sections for the reviews and articles on our site.

The new forums will be organized according to a heirarchy of categories, making it easy to find just the information you're interested in. The search function will also be greatly improved, and lots of other nifty little features will be appearing over time.

As mentioned, we'll be rolling the "comments" pages from our reviews into this system, actually making a separate discussion page for every camera, so camera owners can easily dialog with each other, rather than having it all dump into a single category, or even a single category for that particular manufacturer. (Thus, there'll be a Coolpix 950 forum, a Coolpix 990 forum, etc, in addition to the general Nikon forum.)

We're going to be importing the *entire* contents of the current discussion database into the new system, so all the old discussion threads will still be present and searchable. This process will take several hours, during which time the forum system will be unavailable. We've scheduled this conversion to happen this Saturday morning (8/19/00), as Saturday AM is generally a slower time in the forums. (We probably should ideally have done it at 3AM Sunday or something, but we do in fact sleep from time to time, so opted for Saturday AM as a reasonable compromise.) We expect the current forums to come down sometime around 10 AM, and the new forum system to go back up by 3 PM or so, hopefully earlier.

The comments pages will be merged into the new system over the next week or so, so there will be discussion forums appearing for about a hundred individual cameras over the next week to ten days.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but I'm sure you'll agree that the new forums will be more than worth the minor hassle.

(BTW, I'm going to edit the title of this post to make it bold/red, but that will have the unfortunate effect of making it so that you can't respond to this particular thread. If you have comments, either make another, separate post, or email me at web@imaging-resource.com)

Cheers! Dave Etchells web@imaging-resource.com

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), August 18, 2000