For a long time, the existing forum has not served us very well.  Today, I migrated to a new, custom built forum for this website.  The intention was to simplify the forum and only add things that are actually used here.  I hope it satisfies those goals.

All of the old posts were converted to the new forum, so no historical postings were lost.  Some of the features of the new forum:

• Simplified editor
• Ability to upload files to posts and place them inline - uploads are significantly faster as the images are automatically converted to a more efficient format before uploading
• Ability to upload a gpx/kml file into a post - a map will the track will display at the bottom of the post
• Ability to add emojis to posts
• Ability to add reactions (like, sad, mad, etc) to posts
• Simplified private messages
• Ability to taq posts with custom tags to make searching easier
• Ability to mention someone and they will get notified (@Username) - this feature isn't working as well as I'd like - I'm not sure how much it will get used - it may get removed at some point if it continues to be problematic.
• Ability to bookmark posts to come back to them easily in the future
• New Feature - Ability to add interactive polls
• Ability to subscribe to topic and categories so you can be notified when new postings occur
• Ability to report posts (spam, questionable content, etc).
• Ability to preview messages before posting.

Again, the purpose of this was to remove features that didn't seem useful in order to make the forum easier to use and to add a few features that would be useful (polls, track display in a post, private messages).

If you just want to experiment with the new forum to see how it works, there is a Test Forum available (only visible when you are logged in).  Feel free to post whatever in that forum.  At some point I will remove it.

If you have problems, questions or issues with the new forum, please either post a message or send a message to webmaster@trailadvocate.org.