As you may have noticed, the PC World forums were down for a little while today, as we upgraded to a new version of our software. We are squashing a few bugs, and please leave a comment here if you discover any more.

Here's some new stuff you can do in the upgrade:

1) Embed YouTube videos. All you have to do is type { youtube } (with no spaces) before and after the YouTube id. (it is case sensitive, btw -- make sure that youtube is in all lowercase.) For example, if I wanted to share this video that is currently making its way around our office (http://youtube.com/watch?v=FrYRY6kx550) I would just put FrYRY6kx550 between the code above (again, all with no spaces).


Voila!

2) Embedding Content Similar to the new YouTube embed, you can now embed the content of one document into another. The code to do this is
{ embedcontent:id=documentid } with no spaces . Here's an example:

How to Turn Off Forum Email Notifications

You can get the ID for a document by navigating to the document, then noting the last number in the URL. This will usually look like DOC-<document_id>.

3) Set Your Default Tab In the old system, when you clicked on a forum, you were automatically sent to the Overview tab, which may or may not be what you wanted. Now, you can set a default tab in each forum (so it can be different by forum) and it will automatically open to that tab for you when you click on it. I do encourage you not to set the Discussions tab as your default in most forums, as I really want everyone to use and read content from blogs and documents -- I would suggest the Overview tab or the All Content tab. But it's up to you.

4) The new Overview Tab In the old system, the Overview tab was what it was -- and lots of us thought it wasn't that great. I can now customize that tab on a per forum basis to put more stuff there for you. I'm going to be working on these over the next few days. They are really easy for me to change, so if you think another arrangement might be better, please let me know.

Those are the major things.... and of course, there are more admin goodies for me under the hood.

Again, please let us know what you think and if you see any bugs. Thanks!

I really want to thank everyone for being patient and largely positive (or at least constructive) about our new system. Overall, this is one of the best post-launch days I've had on any community. Thank you, all of you.

I wanted to also highlight two of the new content types and features this new system brings to us, and encourage you all to try them out. We're all really excited about giving you a lot more freedom to create and share your knowledge.

Documents

Many of you have seen that I've been posting some documents on how to use the system, as well as converting some threads to documents. Well, this is for all of you to do too, not just me! Documents are just a more formal name for wikis. They are meant to be informational -- to define a term, to solve a problem, to give information on a subject. My hope is that our documents become a robust technology encyclopedia and a source of fantastic and useful tips.

All of you can write and edit documents. You don't have to be a moderator or administrator, just a member of the community.

You can also convert a discussion thread into a document by clicking the "Convert to Document" selection in the Actions menu on the right side of the thread. This will load the thread contents into the document template, and you can edit down from there. The system will automatically create a link back to the thread that the document came from, and you should leave that. Then tag it, set any collaboration options, and submit for approval.

(I approve all documents, and I'm only looking for Community Standards violations.)

Blogs

Well, you are reading this, so you are halfway there on blogs already! You can start your own blog, or contribute to a subject blog. To contribute to a subject blog, just let me know which you'd like to write in. You can start your own blog by going to New, then Blogs, then clicking the link to create a personal blog. Write about whatever you'd like, as long as it's within our community standards.

Questions

When you are posting a thread that is a question, please consider marking it as a question. All new threads are automatically questions by default. This allows you to later designate "correct" and "helpful" answers, and gives the people that wrote those answers points. It's a way of saying "thank you" to people who helped you, and encourages people to continue helping others. Don't forget to come back and award points once your problem is solved!

Tags

When starting a new discussion thread, document or blog post, you can tag your content. I encourage you to do this, as it creates a rich system for finding related content in our community. Tagging content is easy and quick, but the benefits are huge.

Thanks again for your patience and questions. I'll be using this blog to update about changes in the community as well as to communicate changes about the site in general.