Site rebuild progress report #4

This last week progress was significantly slowed by an outbreak of bronchitis, but we still finished up some important features in between all the coughing:

• Achievement badges! There are about 35 achievements right now, and I'm sure we'll add more in the future. They range from community achievements, such as giving a certain number of helpful or encouraging critiques, to practice achievements like completing a certain class length, to personal achievements like being brave enough to submit your work for critique for the first time.
• The system for photographers to submit photo bundles to the site, and the profit sharing programs that will let us "go halfsies" on any profits made on those photo bundles, was completed. This one was quite the doozy of a project!
  An on-site, personal activity feed was built, to let you see at a glance what responses your forum posts and drawings have received, what new achievement badges you've earned lately, and more.
• A fun new extension was added to the img bbcode tag we use on the forums. Basically, it lets you enter the id # of any image you have uploaded to our site, and the bbcode tag handles setting up not just the image, but a link to see that image in larger format in your user profile. It makes it super-easy to show off images you upload to your personal Line of Action sketchbook on our forums, in comments, etc.
• A gaggle of new tools for the moderation team; you'll probably never see these, but we hope you'll experience their impact in a pleasant and safe community for years to come.
• The new server we're going to move to was secured and fully set up, and the version we're going to launch with is currently undergoing quality assurance in that environment.
• We decided to go ahead and open this new version up for use on September 7th! More on that in this announcement: Site change-over scheduled