OK, so it took about 3 months longer than it should have, but we are making progress! The TSR forums have now completed the merge from our own hosted vBulletin forums which were very old and out of date and running on our own hardware. The content has been merged into a hosted solution with Invision Powerboard, a different forum platform that many of you will no doubt already be familiar with. This will allow us to reduce our costs in the long term and remove some of the technical load on our team now that our staff numbers have reduced.

So what's new? Well, at the time of writing this, not much, but I'm working on it! You should now be able to visit the new forums from the links at the top of the site (under Community), or if not, they are here. I am in the process of clearing out some of the old, unused forums, reorganizing the ones we are keeping and setting up user groups to give you all access to the same content that you had before. This will take a few days, so don’t panic just yet if you were a higher access level than you are right now (Artists for example), I'll get to it.

We also plan to turn on some of the bells and whistles that you aren't used to from our old forums, like Topic Rating and Reputation Points, Member Ranks etc. Some people love them, some people hate them. Me? I haven't decided yet! The Live Chat will also be enabled and will replace our old, cranky IRC server.

One thing you will immediately notice is that the forums have been styled around the new, upcoming version of TSR (Version 8), with its large, bold header and footer and new navigation. Right now we are aware of some design issues around the forum and header/footer including some broken links, missing ads, images vertical instead of horizontal... but it's being worked on... honest! It's easier to start working towards Version 8 than reusing the old v7 code.

I have lots to do to polish the forums (replacing old Smilies and adding some new ones for example), and some of the layout will likely change (forum listing) but as you are all eager to get back in, we are opening the forums for you now. Have fun with them, and feel free to post your feedback and experiences here, or call in to the Live Chat and say 'ahoy hoy'.

One important note: Your old PM's have not been copied over, so if you have anything important you want to pull from there you need to visit our old forums here. They will remain online until we switch the server off in a couple of weeks.

Lastly, attachments (uploaded files) have just started converting to our cloud host. These were part of the delay as we had planned to remove the facility due to the quantity and file of attachments we have built up over 11 years. You, our community, were quite vocal about keeping them, so we looked at alternate methods of hosting. With tens of thousands of files totalling some 20 Gb they are copying over at the rate of 10 per cycle. It's going to take some time, but attachments will be turning up slowly. In the meantime it will mean missing file links. Again, anything critical, grab it now from the old forums.

Visit the new forums now!

/Steve