Forums! The update you've been waiting for!

A few weeks ago, we informed you about a little Spring Cleaning that was taking place in the Forums and Chat.  We even teased about working on some long-time-coming Forum improvements and enhancements.  Without further ado, we're delighted to provide you with the details for specific updates that will be taking place throughout the Forums over the next handful weeks.


  What's going?

  We'll be removing all the Status Forums and, instead, providing a link that directly goes to the Zendesk Status Forums.  (This provides a consolidated approach, as well as offers the ability to subscribe to status updates via email.)  This system has been test for a while now and we've received positive feedback from those who have participated.  Thank you!

  We'll be saying goodbye to the Sports Forum, simply because it's our least active forum.  (Please note that none of the decisions to remove Forums were made with haste.  We took a close look at traffic levels, as well as the posting rates, and used these metrics to make decisions around some much needed forum pruning.  Should there ever be high enough demand for a forum to return, that can always be looked into.)

  The Beta Tester Forum is no longer required due to the success of our :devdevbug: Group.  We'll also be removing the Prints Forum and encouraging you to keep using printscommunity for all your print-related discussions and suggestions.

  We'll be saying goodbye to the Offsite Rip Reporting Forum, as it was another area with a low posting rate and has been a source of much confusion within the community, particularly around the issue of what we at deviantART can do regarding such matters. We fully expect that such discussions will continue in the Deviants Forum, and perhaps rally further support regarding how to approach such an issue.


  What's being added, merged, or renamed?

By popular demand, we're adding a Religion & Philosophy Forum.

  We're creating a brand new category called Art Related, which will contain Photography, Literature, & Digital Art Forums.  Despite the fact that those forums are currently hidden away from the front page of the Forums, they've have remained surprisingly active and popular.  We'll also include a General discussion area, which will house the merged discussions from the other gallery forums and the Art Scene Forum.

  We're creating a brand new category called Showcase, which will provide an area for you to promote your artwork, groups, chatrooms and events.

  Finally, we're going to create a Technology category to house Hardware, Software & OS discussions.  We'll also be providing a General Nerdiness area. That's right. General Nerdiness!

  There will be some renaming going on too.  Look out for Books & Comics and a distinction of Complaints with Life to reflect the use and reaffirm to new deviants that it's a more general complaints area rather than a specific deviantART complaints, which we all know should be directed to the Help Desk.


  Visual enhancements!

We took on board your claims that sticky threads needed to have more contrast and UI will be providing some swanky new details to improve this. We've also reshuffled the order of some of the categories and made the Premium Members Forum topics visible to everyone, as well as the Seniors. Now you can get an insight into the discussions between Staff and Senior Members, and have a sneak preview of the hot gossip going down with the Premium Members.


    REAL ENHANCEMENTS!

Are you sitting comfortably?!

  Thumbnails in ALL Forums
  Pagination
  Forum Search
  Ability to order forum replies by newest first
  More contrast for stickies
  Autolock forum threads when no posts have happened for 1 month or more
  A new deviantWATCH section for forum posts by your friends
  The ability to browse back up to 1 week ago
  The OP (original poster) will have the ability to block icons and thumbnails from their threads if they wish

We'll also be making some new admin tools, per your suggestions. These include the ability for admins to move forum threads to the correct area if posted in error, and also a specific forum suspension tool.

Last but not least, we're going to remove ads from the Forums!  

We'd like to thank each and every one of you for giving us such great feedback.  We've taken into consideration all suggestions and used them to influence what will be the most extensive update to the Forums in years, and kindly ask that you continue to be patient as we begin to roll out these updates and enhancements out over the next few weeks.