LegRoom.net Kick back and relax

In case you haven't yet explored the new site, I added an official Support Forum to LegRoom.net. I debated whether or not I wanted to do this, as I've never had one on my site in the past and, in general, I'm not really much of a fan of forums to begin with. However, given the relative popularity of my applications (particularly Universal Extractor and AutoFLAC), I decided that it would be easiest for both me and my users to have a centralized location for support and feedback.

Prior to this, all feedback for Universal Extractor was directed to the MSFN forums, AutoFLAC feedback was directed to the Hydrogenaudio forums, and all other feedback was handled via e-mail or website posts. This has worked fine, and I'm very grateful to the fine folks at both MSFN and Hydrogenaudio, but at this point I'd like to begin consolidating feedback and support into a single location. I'll continue to monitor those topics and post new release notices, but I ask that all future support requests be submitted via the LegRoom.net Support Forum.

I'm going to update my software pages shortly to reflect this change. If you have any problems with or questions about this change, please let me know (or better yet, post to the forum! :-).

Note: Only registered users can create new topics. Anonymous users can post comments to existing topics, but you must register to post a new topic.

This is the first post in what will probably be a series of two or three posts detailing what's new and different in this version of the site. I'm not trying to drag this out any longer than necessary, but it's (still) taking a whole lot of work to get everything "just right", so I want to make sure that I don't miss anything. Tonight's topic: major differences from previous site, particularly those that affect users. This will take a little while, so get comfy. :-)

Probably the biggest issue that will affect users is the fact that I did not migrate user accounts to the new site. This means that anyone that had a previous LegRoom.net website account will need to create a new one. There are actually several reasons for this (most involve technical challenges and limitations), but the primary reason I chose to do this is due to the very large number of old, unused, and spam accounts that had been created over a span of five years on the last site. Since we're moving to a completely new site, I felt this would be a great time to "clean the slate", so to speak. Any and all users are still welcome to register a new account, which can be done here. The main site content will continue to be publicly available, though some site features are restricted to registered users (just like the old site).

Now, let's talk about posts and comments. As you can see, I was able to migrate all prior news posts, including comments, to the new site. However, there are two limitations:

• All posts appear to come from jbreland (my account)
• All comments are properly attributed to the original poster, but they are no longer associated with a particular account

For the most part, this won't be an issue. With just a few exceptions, the vast majority of posts on the previous site were done by myself anyway; for those that weren't, I apologize to the original poster - I'm certainly not trying to take credit. As for the comments, the only issue this creates is that older comments are no longer associated with any current users. For example, if I search for all comments made by user jbreland, it won't show any of the older comments. Like I said, it's not really an issue, but something to keep in mind.

While on the topic of comments, one thing I'm happy to mention is that I've reenabled anonymous comments on news posts. As many of you are probably aware, I had major issues with comment spam on the previous site. Disabling anonymous helped greatly, but I still had to deal with massive comment spam from people who created accounts for the sole purpose of posting spam. Fortunately, Drupal offers a very nice anti-spam module that can detect and flag/delete comment spam. If this works as well as I'm hoping, I plan on leaving anonymous comments enabled. This should make it much easier for visitors to leave quick feedback on any particular news post.

That should pretty much cover user-related issues. One other related item is the new Support Forum, but I'll discuss that in its own post.