It's so chic

In our usual fashion, we've given AT a minor refresh this Sunday evening before the masses visit tomorrow morning. We've moved away from the beige into something a bit more blue/grey, just trying to stay neutral while updating the look a bit. You'll notice that the tabs up top have a new font and are condensed quite a bit. The new font makes its appearance on the left nav as well.

The comments system has been heavily revamped, here are the changes:

1) First and foremost, anonymous posting is no longer allowed. You can choose not to show your email address but you need to post from an account you've created (registration is free, we won't spam you, etc...)

2) We've moved to a threaded comment system; it's a request we've gotten from quite a few users, so no more typing the # before the post you want to respond to, just respond to that individual post and you'll branch off of it.

3) You can now rate individual posts based on their content, the higher the rating, the better the content. The system works like this:

- You can either post or rate in a thread, not both. We do this to prevent people from changing the direction of a thread by posting a comment and then rating up or down those who agree/disagree with their point.

- If you rate one or more comments and then decide later that you want to post/reply, you may. When you do so, your votes are simply subtracted out.

- Each post/reply starts with a rating of 2. The highest you can rate a post is 5, the lowest is -1. Each vote either increases or decreases the rating of a post by 1 point.

- Everyone gets the same number of votes per thread. For every 10 posts/replies in a thread, each user gets 1 vote. We may change this as time goes on.

The system is inevitably going to need some tweaking, but we've tried our best to work out the major kinks before launching it. We'll be watching the way it's used over time and make the appropriate changes.

So give it a try, give us your feedback and I'll chime in tomorrow morning with the i-RAM piece and an update from the weekend.

Take care.