I'm pretty fried so I will do a more exhaustive welcome message later on. 

In the mean time, the site as you see it now represents Phase I of the roadmap for Miles By Motorcycle. Please consider this the Foundation for better things to come. Much of the work that has gone into this is not visible in the UI. Currently, what's visible is a forum with some social network features thrown in.

However, this should enable us to find things much more easily. Check out the Advanced Search link in the upper right. You can now search by "thing" (a.k.a. object, namely photo, video, link, etc). But you can also enter tags to search for by entering # followed by a tag. Additionally, you can further restrict your searches by user by entering @ followed by the user name. (In the latter two cases, you must select the value from the dropdown for it to work).

So, you could search for all videos posted by rob last month tagged with DR650SE. (Well, once people start tagging things.) But you can see all the videos that Rob posted or all the photos that I've posted.

Also, you can now INSERT objects into posts. If you enter a link, a box will appear below the post pulling the details of the link and letting you tag it and select a cover photo. Click save and it'll automatically include the link formatted for the post as in:

 
The same is done for videos. If you insert a youtube link it'll automatically include it as a "video" object. For instance: 


 
We also now support videos from Vimeo:


 

You can now also @ mention users to alert them to something happening in the forum. For instance, I might want to alert buffalo rshaug jpcfjr Jay Yun Lung Yang and so forth about this introductory post. 

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There is now a new settings menu in the upper right. You can control with fine granularity the notifications you receive in addition to editing your forum signature amongst other settings.

PLEASE: If you receive a notification in error please let me know ASAP.

Also, the Invite link should work now. You can invite members to the site using that link and they will then get "credited" towards your account here. Maybe we'll do some kind of membership drive contest. 

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There is also a notifications dropdown now that will highlight notifications you've received. You will also notice a new top level Links menu that will list all the links and videos posted to the site. 

ALSO, objects are now linked. You can go to a photo and click the Mentions tab at the bottom to see all the posts in the site where that photo is mentioned. The same is true for links and videos. So, if you want to find some point but the only thing you can remember is that it had a motogp photo it in it, you can find the post via the photo. Hopefully this will turn out to be cool. 

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In an out of character attempt to lighten things up a bit I decided to play with an extended set of emoticons that you can now include using the word inside of : characters notation.

Emoticons include:

beer  
bang  
rotfl  
yawn  
deadhorse
hi
disbelief
cool
thinking
deepthinking
twitching
rimshot (specifically for jpcfjr
 )
wasps
clap  
dunno
wtf  
and my favorite, woosh

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Photo uploading has been improved. You can now upload a bunch of photos either directly in a forum post or from the add photos link on the photos page. For most modern cameras it should now auto-rotate the uploaded photos. We'll see how well that works. Please give it a try and let me know if anything breaks. 

This has represented a huge amount of work. I suspect that there will be quite an extended period of tweaking before it's "close" to right. In the meantime I hope you enjoy this new version of the software. Please do let me know any thoughts you have. I am motivated to make it the best that it can be. 

Thank you all very much. In the end, if it weren't for you guys, and you know who you are, I would never have put so much energy into this. I get a real kick out of the thought that you guys will all be using something I've built from scratch. 

Great work and thanks for all your efforts! I really need to dig deeper into this site!