Mobile & Tablet Support

iPad, iPhone, Andriod & Windows Phone Ready InstantForum.NET 2012 now comes with a dedicated, touch optimized theme for all the latest mobile & tablet devices.

Gesture Support Our mobile theme takes advantage of the latest developments in HTML 5 & JavaScript to support touch gestures. You can swipe your finger back and forth on pages to quickly navigate around.

One Web Address As InstantForum.NET 2012 can present a different experience deepening on the device used to access your community you'll only ever need a single web address for both traditional web access and mobile access.

We detect the latest mobile devices The mobile browser detection supports all mobile device platforms including Windows Phone, Apple, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, WebOS & Meego. As we continue to develop and improve our mobile support we hope to provide a unique skin to match the native experience on each mobile OS. To help achieve this we are looking to take advantage of jQuery mobile in the future.



User Achievements

Helping your members feel special InstantForum.NET 2012 now includes over 80 achievements our the box that your users can earn as they participate in your community. We now show off your achievements to others within your user card and user profile page...



Custom Achievements You can create custom achievements which can be associated with individual members within your community. For example if you offer a webinar or meet-up and your community members attend you may wish to recognize this by creating a unique achievement.

Customize Achievements to Suite Your Site The achievement milestones can be completely customized via the InstantForum.NET admin control panel to suite your community depending on the typical usage and traffic you expect. You can also disable achievements allowing those who have earnt an achievement to keep it but preventing others from earning the achievement in the future.



Achievements also tie into the new reputation system within InstantForum.NET 2012. As an administrator you can define for example if additional bonus reputation points should be awarded to users as they earn particular achievements. The goal of the achievement system is to encourage your users to participate more and to recognize & reward users for the time and effort they give helping within your community. Achievements are also a great way for people just consuming content to quickly identify who they can trust in your community.

User Reputation

We've completely rewritten the reputation system for InstantForum.NET 2012. Previously InstantForum.NET featured a fairly simple reputation system which didn't serve the purpose of actually reflecting your reputation base don all the activities you can perform within the forum. Previously the reputation for users was simply tied to the number of posts you had made within the forum.

Earn Reputation, All the time With InstantForum.NET 2012 you'll not only earn reputation for posting within the forums but you'll also earn reputation for over 20 other paticipation activities. For example if someone likes a post you've made or one of your posts receive a 5 star rating you'll be awarded a certain number of reputation points.

Reputation Details A history of all reputation activities is available on each user profile page as shown on the left. This allows you to see how users have earnt reputation and also provides a nice overview of daily activities for your forum members.



Reputation Levels We've reworked the member levels that existed in InstantForum.NET 2010 to now fit with the new reputation system introduced in InstantForum.NET 2012. We have 10 reputation levels by default and of course you can customize and add to these as your site requires. Your reputation level is indicated by a small reputation bar that is shown alongside all your posts and on your profile page within InstantForum.NET. This allows other s to visually identify a posters standing within the community.

Customizable Reputation As an administrator you have complete flexibility and can of course customize the number of points awarded for every reputation activity within your community. There is a new "Reputation Points" page within the admin control panel allowing you to customize points for all 25 reputation activities.

Facebook Login

You can now login to InstantForum.NET 2012 using your existing Facebook login…



When users login via Facebook InstantForum.NET will automatically obtain your Facebook name and profile photo. This save you having to enter your name again or upload a personal profile photo again. With this addition InstantForum.NET 2012 now allows you to login via Facebook, Twitter, Google, AOL, Yahoo & any OpenID provider of your choice. You can of course disable these login options if your running Instantforum.NET internally and wish to mange user authentication.

Like Button

We've added a new "Like" button for all topics & posts within InstantForum.NET 2012. This provides a simple way for your members and visitors to identify helpful posts & reward posters within the community.

If others like your post as the post author you'll receive reputation points. The goal is to encourage users to post great content in order to gain reputation from others liking their posts. To encourage users to actually like posts you will also be rewarded reputation points for liking posts.

When liking a post within the forum you will also see who else liked the post as shown above. We also provide options to share posts on Facebook & twitter after you've liked a post. If you chamge your mind you can easily delete your like and reputation gains will be reset.

Mark Posts As Answers

With InstantForum.NET 2012 we really wanted to help users find those one or two posts within a topic that really help. Both the original topic author and your forum moderators can now mark posts as answers within topics which will highlight those replies... If you use your community for customer support this should be a very helpful new feature.



Marking posts as answers of course awards reputation points. Similar to Liking posts reputation will be awarded to the user flagging the post as an answer and also the original author of the post being marked as the answer. This offers a strong incentive to actually post helpful replies. Also the quicker you post an accepted answer the more reputation you will be rewarded encouraging quick responses.

Live Post Previews

As you compose topics, replies, polls, private messages or events a live preview of your post will now be displayed below the editor. This eliminates the need to hit the Preview Post button. As you would expect the live preview will show exactly what your post will look like before posting. This includes any formatting and will even automatically thumbnail and resize any inserted image if enabled.



ShareThis.com Integration

You wanted to see support for sharing posts with many other social channels so with InstantForum.NET 2012 we've opted to add ShareThis.com support to achieve this.

Enter your ShareThis.com publisher ID within the InstantForum 2012 admin control panel and ShareThis.com social links will be displayed alongside posts allowing you and your users to easily share posts from your community on many of the top social channels.

ShareThis.com offer in-depth reporting and analysis. This makes it easy to see what's hot in your community and what people are sharing externally. If we don't have a social network you prefer in our list it's now very easy to add new social channels to the share options. Over 120+ social channels are supported. Of course if you don't want to share content externally all social sharing options can be easily disabled through the InstantForum.NET admin control panel.

Inline Spell Checker

We've complete rewritten the spell checker for our InstantForum.NET 2012 update from the ground up to offer a much cleaner, more seamless end user experience. The spell checker is now tightly integrated into our rich-text editor allowing your users to simply hover over mistakes within a post for suggestions. No need to sit there for 5 seconds now whilst the spell checker dialog loads.



We've also added a new permission option which allows you to toggle if users can add custom words to the dictionary. For example you may wish to allow your moderators to add product names to the dictionary so they don't appear as errors every time you spell check a post.

As the core spell checking algorithms are now built directly into our InstantASP.Common framework we hope in the future to introduce features such as "Did you mean" into the InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET search results if you miss spell a search term.

Post Info

For InstantForum.NET 2012 we wanted to provide more insight into individual posts within your community. To acheive this we've added a new "Post Info" pop-up that will display additional information about any post.

To display the pop-up you'll need to click the new "Post Info" button below each post within InstantForum.NET 2012. We opted to use a pop-up as we didn't want to clutter the main topic interface.

Alongside some fairly standard post statistics we wanted to allow you to see who has recently read , liked or rated a post . It's nice to know which other members are reading or liking your posts and exposing this information helps you connect with those members.

Those of you with a keen eye will notice a Google Map in the above screen grab. If enabled we can now show you the location of the user when they posted. This can easily be enabled by providing your Google Maps API key within the InstantForum.NET admin control panel. If you don't provide this no map will ever be displayed.




Share Posts By Email

With InstantForum.NET 2012 you'll find a new share button alongside each post will now open a pop-up dialog which will allow you to share posts via email or on other social networks via our Sharethis.com integration. We've made this process super simple, you'll only need to provide the recipients email address as shown below...

We've made it super simple to share posts via email from within InstantForum.NET 2012.

You can see a quick preview of the message that will be sent using the "SHow Preveiew" button.







New Rating System

We've revamped the 5 star rating interface for InstantForum.NET 2012 to make it easier to rate topics. You'll now find an option to rate topics at the topic of each topic as shown oppersite.

With InstantForum.NET 2012 you can now also rate replies within topics. Below each post you'll find a small rating button which when clicked will allow you to rate a reply between 1 and 5 stars.

We now also support decimal points within rating so you can now rate posts for example 4.5 stars. This provides a little more granularity which can help if you have thousands of ratings.

Post ratings also tie into our new reputation system and points will be awarded to those who rate posts and those who's posts receive a rating. If a post is rated 1 or 2 stars this will award negative reputation to the post author so hopefully this will encourage helpful posts. We want to allow negative reputation although this can be changed as we feel it allows your community to help determine the reputation of a particular member through the posts they have made.

New Tag Edit

If you’re an administrator or moderator it's now much easier to update tags globally within all posts. Previously with InstantForum.NET 2012 you would have to visit each post and update a tag. Obviously not ideal.

With InstantForum.NET there is a new edit button alongside each tag withn the tag cloud and when clicked it will display a pop-up dialog allowing you to edit the tag as shown on the left. This will update all occurrences of the tag within all posts.



New Latest & Popular Posts View

We've changed the default layout for the latest and most popular topics panels displayed within the side bar on the InstantForum.NET homepage and within forums.

We now display a small abstract of the message along with the user photo and provide buttons to allow you to cycle through the results. We feel this new layout is cleaner and allows you to easily get a better feel for the post before clicking the link,

If you did prefer the standard list view don't fear you can enable this again by clicking the small arrow to expand the panel filter & options menu. Here you can toggle between grid and list view.

New Quick Filters

We wanted to make it easier for moderators & contributors to quickly find posts that have not yet received a reply or an answer within your forum.

To achieve this we've added a small filters menu to the top of each forum as shown on the left. This can be helpful for example if you provide customer support via your forums and want to ensure all posts within a forum have an accepted answer. The new quick filters menu also contains some helpful sort functions allowing you to quickly identify the most popular conversations.


New ToolTips

We've added new consistent contextual tooltips to the various buttons & elements within InstantForum.NET to make it easier for users to identify what buttons and clickable objects do. The new tooltips also allow use to present additional information when you however over elements

The tooltips are delayed so you'll need to leave your mouse over elements before the tooltip will display. This is the prevent the annoying flicking effect if your moving your mouse quickly around the screen.

New Post Buttons

We've dramatically changed the post buttons with this update. We no longer use images for the post buttons. Image buttons are difficult to translate. If you wanted to update the button colours or text with InstantForum.NET 2010 you would have to update 30+ images. Also each image button is an additional request to the server which we wanted to avoid as we move towards better mobile support.

Buttons in InstantForum.NET 2012 are now generated through a combination of CSS and background images. This means we wont' need to download an separate image for every button. The text can also be easily localized as it's now within our language pack. Changing button colours through out InstantForum.NET now only requires you modify a hand full of background images.

New Private Message Notifications

We've improved several of the notifications within InstantForum.NET 2012. We wanted to move away from standard JavaScript alert boxes as they don't provide a great user experience and can halt script execution until you access the prompt.

With InstantForum.NET 2012 we now use a custom notification that will appear for a few seconds at the top of pages to provide visual feedback for various actions such as rating posts or to inform you for example if you have new private messages.

New Topic Preview

When you hover over topics within a forum with InstantForum.NET 2012 you'll now see a small arrow appear on the right of the topic. You can click this arrow to expand the topic and show a preview of the first and last post within the topic.

This is handy if you quickly want to get a feel for the topic content without having to visit each topic.

Single Sign On

We've added a feature we call user replication to InstantForum.NET 2012. This now allows you to automatically keep user information in sync across all InstantASP databases. This makes it much easier now to achieve a single sign on experience across our forum and knowledgebase products. You can define which databases to keep in sync through a simple XML configuration file and enable this within the admin control panel as shown below...



New Script Bundling & Minification

InstantForum.NET 2012 now provides the option to bundle JavaScript and CSS into a single request at runtime. The goal is to reduces the number of resources that need to be loaded by browsers before the page can be processed. Along with script bundling we also provide an option to allow you to minify the core JavaScript and CSS files at runtime. This results in fewer bytes and quicker pages.

New Favorites Button

We've added a new favourites button to all forums and posts. This allows you to quickly add forums or topics to your favourites list and optionally subscribe to forum or topics by email. We display the subscription count above all forums and posts and you can sort by subscriptions so you can quickly identify your popular forums and posts.


Improved Private Messages

We've improved private messages with our 2012 update to now show the original senders name within the list of messages.

Also when viewing a private message now if it's a response to a private we'll also show the original private message. This makes it much easier now to understand the context of private messages as you can see the original private message you responded to.

Image Resizing

InstantForum.NET 2012 will now automatically thumbnail images if they exceed a specific size. You can set the desired size within the InstantForum.NET admin control panel. You can of course click the thumbnail to view the larger image in a new window.

In addition InstantForum.NET 2012 will make an effort to ensure images always fit on your screen. For example if your using a small mobile device with a maximum screen width of 300 pixels we'll detect this and ensure the thumb nailed image still fits nicely on screen.

jQuery Support

We've rewritten several areas of InstantForum.NET 2012 to take advantage much more of jQuery. Specifically we've replaced several update panels with the jQuery AJAX methods which offer much better performance. jQuery is embedded directly into InstantForum.NET allowing JavaScript developers to use a framework they are probably familiar with.

HTML 5 & CSS 3 Support

InstantForum.NET 2012 now produces HTML 5 W3C validated mark-up. We always strive to stay ahead of the latest web standards and whilst HTML 5 is not finalized it is supported by all modern browsers so this update is a good time to introduce support. We do of course down grade gracefully for older browsers that don't support HTML 5 & CSS 3.

The default themes provided with InstantForum.NET 2012 also take advantage of newer CSS 3 features to reduce the need for images and CSS hacks to achieve the same effect in CSS 2.

Other Improvements & Notes

We've also made a whole host of other smaller improvements throughout the 2012 update as well as fixing a number of bugs we have learnt of since our 2010-5 update. For a complete list of updates and fixes included in InstantForum.NET 2012 please see the forum posts below…

InstantForum.NET 2012 Final Notes
InstantForum.NET 2012 RC 1 Notes
InstantForum.NET 2012 BETA 1 Notes

For upgrade instructions please see...

InstantForum.NET 2010-5 to 2012