Here's the thing guys and gals ...
We were running on version 3 of our forum software and portal software and getting more and more vulnerable to hackers. Our portal software is no longer being published because the owner died about four or five years ago. This upgrade took us to the current stable version of our forum software and we also changed to a new portal software. So this was a major change internally that Anthony and I spent six months testing on a test site before I OK'd the change. For me, there is a lot more that is new to learn than for all of you. We've made every effort to preserve the look and feel of the old software. So whatever is different for you may take some getting used to and we are looking for comments, so keep them coming.
The new software is mostly CSS based while the old was template based. Making changes is more difficult now for me. This means that a few changes we made over the last ten years may be more difficult to do or have been lost forever. The red text display of premium forums was a template change that Bobby Fosson figured out as a hack ... It is gone forever. The different styles, like Carbon and Harvest are something I will try to recreate in the future, but for now are gone. Indicators that you have posted in a thread, etc. were probably in the design of the old portal software and not in the new. The positioning of the page numbers in the Recent Threads block is something I had changed. If most prefer it at the bottom, I will change it to there.
The new software makes us safer, supposedly faster and has a number of new features including an improved search. We hope those of you who are put off by the new interface will give it a chance for you to get used to it.