We have recently applied a major software update to TIWWA, which has introduced many great new features and improvements both in terms of functionality and design.

New features include a new responsive layout that works great on mobile and touch devices as it does on a PC. Smarter profiles for members with the ability to upload and reposition your own cover images. You can now mention a member in a post by typing an @ sign and as you type their name it will autocomplete for you. The person will be notified they've been mentioned (depending on how they have set their notification options), which is a great way to attract someone's attention to something that might interest them.

We also have a brand new text editor, and now have the option to split up our smilies and emoticons into Categories and re-order them, which I'll be doing soon.

A completely re-written software project will always mean some issues and bugs, but a lot of hard work is being done to identify and address them. One of the biggest issue we have was caused by the text converter part of the upgrade which converted the database to UTF-8 character sets to improve support for international language characters and symbols. It seems many of our older posts which contained links, have had those links modified unintentionally and which now cause the page they are on to reload. This has happened on many other websites, and the developers are looking into why and how to fix it.

Many of you will be missing the Shoutbox, but this not an official add-on. It's made by a developer as a third party add-on, and there isn't currently a full release compatible with the new version of our software. We attempted to use a beta release candidate version but it was causing a massive spike in server resource usage taking us over 300-500% more than we are permitted on Shared Hosting, even with our recent move to a new web-host and more powerful server. Server usage remains high so we have reported this to the software developer to understand why and hopefully to prevent our account being suspended! There is now an alternative to Shoutbox, again a 3rd party app, which we can try out and which works the same, but I need to understand the high server use first.

The next software release primarily focuses on stability with many bug fixes, not all of which we may be experiencing. Amongst other important fixes, it will address:

• Some reports of issues with insert/embed images into posts

IPS are also working on big improvements to the Search system but, until those are ready, they have made two small changes to make search a bit more pleasant: date will be default sort order and words will be searched using AND logic rather than OR logic.

This is a list of items in progress but not yet assigned to a specific scheduled release. Items here are are coming very soon: usually within a month or so. Check back often as we update our roadmap!

Current estimated for this coming soon section: early September

• Gallery enhancements
  • User interface improvements to make what already works more friendly for the end user
  • Sorting/filtering improvements
  • Easier moderation
• Content discovery
  • Search system overhaul
  • View new content improvements
  • Activity stream improvements
  • Improvements to the followed content section to make it more useful
• Editor enhancements including native quote ability to remove annoyances dealing with quotes, we now use DIV rather than IFRAME mode for faster loading, and mobile experience is also greatly improved.
• Image proxy system so remotely linked images on SSL sites are routed through a local proxy to maintain a secure page.