Welcome to the new forums powered by the Zoho Discussions platform. So what is new here? The most obvious is the pleasant look and feel. There is more to the new discussions than just the user interface. Allow us to give a quick primer of the exciting new features.

Topic Types:
Add more meaning to your post by classifying appropriately. Right now, 4 topic types are supported:

Questions: You can answer a Question, comment on an Answer, choose which response really "Answers" the question and, of course, mark a particular answer as a BEST ANSWER for your question.

Ideas: Feel that you have a brilliant idea that you think will be wonderful add-on to a product / service you love? Propose it. Of course, apart from support in form of votes, your community will be able to support you further by filling gaps and refining your idea - so that your original good idea gets even better. In fact if the other proposal is so good, you can yourself vote that that modification and lend more weightage!

Problems: Have a problem that you cant solve yourself? Raise it and let the community help you. Like a question, one can propose a solution to a problem, comment on a proposed solution, choose which response really "Solves" the problem and, of course, mark a particular solution as a BEST SOLUTION.
Discussion: Express yourself, an opinion - let others participate by responding, commenting and voting.


Pick one that is appropriate for your topic and make it easy for other users to sort through, focus, learn and respond.




Topic Status Labels:
Topics can additionally be given status labels like "In the works", "Alternate suggested". Forum representatives use this feature so that users do not get a "gone into the blackbox" feeling.

Along with topic types, voting, topic status labels can give a much needed boost to community prioritized features like what is running in zoho creator forums.

My Area - preferences, private messages, bookmarks / watchlists, followers and more:

Features here are targeted to improve your productivity in using this forum. Through the preferences tab, you can

1. Choose your display identity aka Avatar
   
2. Choose your reading style (quick view vs. full thread view).
   
3. Choose your privacy options - show email, website, wiki site etc.
4. Choose the number of posts you want to read per page

Following / Watching: This is a very important productivity boosting feature. When you follow an item, you get email / chat feeds when any activity happens on that item. You can choose to follow

1. Specific forums - say Zoho Dsicussions Forum to listen to any topics / responses posted by any one in any of Zoho Discussion's sub forums
2. Specific Sub Forums - same thing at a sub forum level
3. Specific Author - This is very productive for a closed group discussion space.
4. Specific Topic - Keep up-to-date with responses / voting on a specific topic

When you vote for a topic, the framework automatically adds that topic to your watchlist. Apart from your email / chat feed, your My Area -> dashboard and WatchList areas will reflect any updates happening on your watchlist.



Member Profiles and User Labels:
User Profile lets you look at their usage, read posts and responses by specific users, look at their labels (like company representative, expert, etc).

You can view a user's profile quickly by just hovering over the user.

In a quick profile view, you get to see the number of posts and responses. Also you can see the label assigned to the user. In this snapshot, our CEO Sridhar is labeled as CEO.

To view a full profile about the user, click on the view profile in the quick profile view or click on the user name anywhere you see it. Here is a snapshot that illustrates the usage.

Additionally we have:

1. Upgraded Search
2. Provided advanced search (still more coming)
   
3. Added more Avatars - thanks to ToonDoo's exciting Avatar Creator
   
4. Improved the editor (still more coming)
5. Improved statistics

This forums is going to get more dynamic and friendly as the core platform improves.

We were pretty excited developing and fine tuning this platform. Hope that you too find this new upgrade very pleasant to work with. Should you face any difficulty - we are just a Question / Problem away .

Regards
Dhan