Forums 3 - Release 5

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:33:54 Z

Forums Release 5 went live yesterday, and includes enhancements to sign-in, marking posts as helpful or abusive, and many bug fixes.

Stay signed in

With the addition of the latest version of Live ID authentication, you can stay signed in to forums for up to 24 hours. If you close your browser, then open a new one, when you navigate back to forums – you’re still signed in!

Save your password

If you install the Windows Live Sign-In Assistant (part of the Windows Live suite), you can easily switch between different users sharing the same machine. Plus, you can finally save your password and sign in to forums very quickly every time you visit.

Marking posts helpful/abusive

We listened to your feedback about options in the vote menu not being discoverable, and removed it. There is now an option next to quote to let other users know a “Post was helpful”. We hope this will encourage more helpful flagging, so that the best information is more discoverable. On the other hand, we’ve made reporting abusive posts more discoverable by moving the link back to the bottom right corner of each post where it was in the old forums.

Many bugs have been addressed in this release as well, so please check any bugs you’ve previously reported to see if they’ve been addressed. In particular, we fixed a number of issues regarding special characters in display names and tags. As always, we welcome you feedback, please let us know what you like and what you don’t by posting to the bugs and suggestions forums.

We’re preparing to migrate more forums over from http://forums.microsoft.com, I’ll post another announcement soon with details of what to expect.

Thanks,

-Andrew

Forums Product Planner, Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com