Hey Folks,

We are back after just over 2 days of downtime and judging from the amount of hits the site has been getting over the last 48 hours - I suspect alot of you have been eager to see the changes and updates that we have made for 2009.

New Website and Forum Design
First and foremost - I am sure you have all noticed the brand new forum design.  This is the result of two months worth of sketches and demos to find a fresh new look for our little community.  We finally arrived at the design you can see here today - which has been coded by a member of the Simple Machine Forum Development Team to ensure 100% validation.

Along with the new design, we have incorporated over 1500 new Star Trek Avatars into the avatar system and added a new range of smileys.

There are dozens of other tweaks and cool bits which are too numerous to go into here - but you will surely notice them.

We have also updated the website for 2009 so that it has a much nicer and sleeker design.  We have dropped our "no scrolling" mentality for the website and written a custom portal that will display all of the latest Star Trek Gaming News on the front page of the website as it happens.

Software upgrade to 2.0
We have upgraded the Simple Machine Forum software from version 1.1.7 to 2.0 beta 4.   While we would normally try to shy away from beta versions, we have been testing this version for several months behind the scenes and it has performed flawlessly.   The updated software comes with a range of new features such as a WYSWING Editor for forum posting, dozens of security and performance updates and much more.

Gallery
We have ripped out our old gallery which was, we admit, pretty dire and replaced it with a bridged version of Coppermine which has been skinned and integrated into the website.   Into this gallery, we have uploaded over 4000 Star Trek Gaming Screenshots from every Star Trek Game that we have been able to find - both official and fan made.  We have also included a modding section.

The gallery is fully public - which means you can upload your own screenshots into gallery, create new categories and help us add to our huge database of screenshots.

Downloads System
We have added a download system into the website.   This download system currently contains every single official Star Trek Patch that has ever been released for any Trek Game and we also have put over a dozen of the best Star Trek Fan Games.

We also have a modding section which is currently empty, however we hope to flesh this out over the next couple of weeks.

This download system is also fully public, which means YOU can upload your own mods and files into the database.  We certainly hope you will.

Coming in the next couple of weeks....
There are a couple of features that we wanted to get online today that have unfortunately had delays and while we do not want to give too much away - we have several features that will be launching in January which we hope will continue to grow our community and provide some updated and much needed services to the entire community.

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We hope you all like the new design and will continue to participate in our community throughout 2009 and beyond.

Please feel free to post any comments about the updates here - and if you notice any bugs, please post those also.

Wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous 2009,

The Hailing Frequency Team