There is now a preference to turn off avatars, or to choose between small or large sized avatars. This should make some of the more vocal “large avatar” advocates happy (I won’t mention any names so that joefromchicago doesn’t feel bad).
Search tags feature added
The ability to search tags has been added to the tag listings (what were the old tag clouds) and it will search as you type to allow you to find any existing tag you can spell (and with the as-you-type searching even some you don’t).
Post ratings floor set to 0
The topic and post ratings will be changing in the future, but to help eliminate the focus on the negative ratings the display has had a floor set at 0, effectively making 0 the minimum rating currently displayed for a post or topic.
Profile pages now show latest individual user posts
The ability to view a users’ individual posts has been placed on the user profile page. This allows you to easily see a user’s most recent individual posts while the “My Posts” page shows the topics they have posted in and can be sorted by recent activity by any of the participants.
The “My Posts” page grouping by topic
At launch the “My Posts” page displayed indivdidual user posts, which made it hard to follow the topics members participated in by the recent topic activity. The page has now been changed to show topics the user has posted in instead of individual posts.
Offsite links open in a new window
Now all offsite links open in a new window like the old site software used to do. Additionally all offsite links use “nofollow” to indicate to search engines to ignore them. This should provide less motivation for people to spam the site for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.
Last post username now displayed on topic grid
The username of the last user to reply to a topic is now being displayed on the topic listings to help users track the latest activity of the topic from the topic listings.
Replying auto votes up a thread or post
Because voting down collapses a post or topic for a user there was more motivation to use the voting down than voting up. Now users who respond to a topic or post automatically vote it up (as long as they haven’t already voted, and the vote can be changed at any time) and the topic and post ratings better reflect what topics and posts the community found interesting enough to respond to.
Quote preference added
If you’d like to have a quote button displayed on every post you can now enable it in your preferences. It is not there by default because it is confusing to users not familiar with the feature to have a “reply” and “quote” button but the users who rely on it can now enable it.
Tag limiting tweaked
Limits on user topic tags and the related tags displayed on a tag page have been changed.