There are several new things you can do with the forums:

• Email subscriptions - You can get email notifications for specific topics, whole sections, or the entire site.
• Hide Irrelevant Forums - On the main page, just click the up triangle on the right side of the section you're not interested in, and that whole section will hide! So if you're from Canada and don't care about the American Regional Biodiesel, just click the triangle on the right side and it'll disappear. The next time you show up, it'll be hidden. Sweet. Just re-click it to show those topics.
  
• Polls - That's right, you can now create polls.
• Attachments - You can attach files to your posts.
• Tags - Add appropriate tags to your posts for the Popular Tags sidebar on the main forum page.  This makes the site more usable.
• Enhanced profile - You can add avatars, talk about yourself, etc, in the profile page (click your name in the header, above the search bar)
• Private Messages - You can send private messages to other users. To find your private messages, click "Inbox" in the upper-right corner of the site (above the search bar).
  
• Word-style Editing - Just select your text and click the Ctrl-I or Ctrl-B to make it bold or italic like in Word! You can even copy and paste to and from word.
• Video! - That's right, you can link to videos on the web using the "Video" tab at the top when you post a message.
• FAST and RELIABLE! - As you all know, we started having problems over the summer, problems which got worse as time passed. Now the site should always be up and will show up way faster than before!
• Tons of new, cool smileys

There's more stuff than that, but that's the beginning. Please use this topic to talk about other enhancements that this forum provides over our old forums.

If you have an RSS reader, or use a page such as My.Yahoo.com or its ilk, you can actually pull content from any BDN forum INTO your reader! Just look for the icon at the bottom of each page.

VERY cool.
 

I've been looking for excuses to test a few of the cool feature and did the poll, email subscribe and RSS (cool) feed feature. I also placed a video clip the other day and it worked well with the quicktime clip that I uploaded. I tried to figure out a link that would let me embed a youtube or google video clip but could figure it out. As for speed ... seems very quick.

So far so good with the editing ... I like the buttons and wondered if there was a color text option. (not that it is needed but occasionally have notice a few 'red' lettered highlights in peoples posts and would love a yellow highlighter stroke when pointing out a key point in a quoted article? Just thought that might already be there but not figured out by me.

And you are right Nate ... "VERY cool." You are a tech-wizzard.
 

I set up an RSS feed to have the Active Topics link appear on my homepage (a my.yahoo.com page) for all my browsers. Sweet!

Is there a way to get views per topic?

That's on my to-do list, but is fairly far down it unfortunately. It's an add-on hack, and I need to get more familiar with the forum coding before attempting it (as evidenced by the header not quite cooperating in Internet Explorer).

Let's not forget the email subscriptions! How cool is that?

Added (in the top message) the Inbox announcement (in the upper-right corner of the site to see your private messages) and the "Hide a forum" ability.