As most of you probably very well know, the site is now coming off of a long downtime period, running the newly upgraded Simmania 3. SimLink, k50, and myself have worked very hard to bring this to you, and this is literally the first overhaul of the entire site's look and feel in what's literally been years.

Some of the changes are probably pretty obvious by the time you get to this thread:

* New portal
* Completely fresh look and design
* New menu
* Cleaner "who is online" section below the boards.
* And much more.

There are also several changes that might not be so obvious. Some of these are:

* Reorganized and cleaned up the boards.
* SM points. (Similar to reputation in many respects. Users gain SM points by posting in certain boards, or by getting SM points from an admin for being extra helpful in the community. )
* New BAT general discussion board.
* Drafts (you can now save posts as drafts before they are posted)
* Automatic Image resizer

As we have worked hard to complete the work as quickly as possible, we may have made mistakes during the process. Please report any bugs, suggestions, or general feedback in this thread.

EDIT: Report bugs here: https://simmania.darkbb.com/t591-sm3-bug-report-thread

Aside from that, Welcome back Simmania!

Blake is indeed right - we've put a lot of work into taking Simmania to the next level. While it required a lot of downtime, we figure it's worth it. We hope you love the new look and all the new features!

-sl

Great work guys. The forums look great.

Wow, it looks great! Much more has been done then what I thought possiable with the site's budget. Going to take some getting used to though... By the way some dead links on the front page. I was getting the run around trying to find the forums that's why I said "going to take some getting used to" but really other then that amazing work!

Thanks We'll definitely look into the dead links. There are some things like that we are still working to solve. Thanks for letting us know!

-Blake

No problem, I was just getting a run around. At the home page if you click forums at the top... It refreshs the home page basically.

That's strange. It might be some glitch that we haven't fixed yet from the downtime page. We'll definitely take a look at this.

This looks awesome, and it was hardly any downtime at all!!

Is there any explanation as to how the points system works?

Glad you like it Edge. As for the points system, they're in essence like rep points on ST, however they're awarded based on posts and which board they're published in. You can buy them, they're just to show how helpful/active you are in the community.

Some other questions can be answered here: https://simmania.darkbb.com/faq


Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

"SM points" are given to users for starting topics and replying to threads in certain boards. They are designed to award users points for being helpful in the community.

Also, we'll award users additional points if we see something we really like on the forums. (E.g. outstanding work on a tutorial, etc...) The reason we are not using reputation is because the reputation system allows users to vote their own posts, and our forum host does not allow that to be turned off, so this is our workaround.

Blake wrote:"SM points" are given to users for starting topics and replying to threads in certain boards. They are designed to award users points for being helpful in the community.

Also, we'll award users additional points if we see something we really like on the forums. (E.g. outstanding work on a tutorial, etc...) The reason we are not using reputation is because the reputation system allows users to vote their own posts, and our forum host does not allow that to be turned off, so this is our workaround.

Thanks simLink and Blake for responding. This sounds like a really good idea!!

This. Looks. Awesome.

Great job everyone, it's stunning!

It looks good guys

I have to get used to all the new stuff but I like what has been done

Looks amazing!

I like the new site, it's easier and more user friendly

mayorm wrote: I have to get used to all the new stuff but I like what has been done

LOL no kidding we definitely overhauled pretty much everything that had anything to do with SM2 hopefully SM3 lasts us a while though

I leave for a day or so and I come back and this has happened! I love it!!!

Republicmaster wrote:I leave for a day or so and I come back and this has happened! I love it!!!

Yeah, we pretty much surprised the entire community with it. Glad you like the work!

I love it

Just to give a sense of how far Simmania has come, this is a recreated version of what the original simmania truly looked like. Not many of us have been around long enough to see this one, as even the internet archives don't have it



We call it "SM zero" nowadays

I remember that banner!! Classic

Glad everyone is liking it - it's certainly an improvement. ALso kinda neat to see what Simmania looked like ages ago, long before I was ever here.

God I was around then and I don't even remember that

Mayorm got rid of it pretty fast. It was in the first couple months of the site, and if I'm doing my math correctly it would be late summer 2009. I was lucky to find a "partial" snapshot on it on the internet archives, and I was able to recreate it on another site from that.

All that really matters is that it was too long ago to remember

I vaguely remember seeing that, despite the fact I wasn't registered here then, I imagine I visited at some point during that time.

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