Welcome to the new Antares!

Welcome to the new Antares, ladies and gentleman!

I am super excited to finally launch this website. It's jam packed with new features, all of which I'm going to list below.

This venture cost me $350 - that's how much I need to recoup in donations or upgrades to just break even. I hope you guys appreciate the hard work that went into this enough to donate, but if you can't donate for any reason, I understand. I was and am more than happy to create this for you all. I hope it sees use!

Now, onto the good part. The features!

Account Associations
You can now associate your forum account with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Steam. You can then use these to login to the forums quickly and easily, as well as earn trophies for doing so.

Account Upgrades
We've added new upgrades for your forum account that you can purchase to unlock various benefits and conveniences. These may change over time as we tweak and balance them. They were mainly added to help fund Antares and counteract slowly dropping donations.

AD Styler
You can now customize the forum to suit your own preferences! Use the AD Style button on the bottom-left of the forum and toy around with it. You can customize almost everything.

Application System
We now have a proper application system built into the forums. No more reading instructions and creating threads! All available applications will be at the bottom of the sidebar.

Bookmarks
You can now bookmark almost any content on the forums so you can get back to it quickly and easily.

Better Badges
The Trophy/Badge system has been completely overhauled. Now badges are Small (5), Medium(10), or Large(15). Badges for positive ratings are worth triple over others to encourage high quality content. Icons and imagery for badges will be added at a later date. Badges also contribute to your overall level. (Read more below)

Collapsible Categories
You can now collapse categories you'll never use. Hide away games you don't intend on playing to reduce clutter. Unfortunately, the News Feed will still contain posts and threads from those forums.

Conversation Overhaul
The conversation system has been completely overalled. You can now:

• Kick people from conversations you've started
• Create groups to invite many people at once
• Create conversation prefixes for organization
• Set up an auto-responder to respond when you're away (Upgrade required)
• Set up filters to avoid certain messages (Upgrade required)

CloudFlare
We're running on CloudFlare, a service that essentially makes the website even faster and more secure than it would be without. We're also utilizing CloudFlare's Railgun technology to reduce loading times even further!

Double Posts Merge
Double posts now automatically merge. No more endlessly bumping content! (You can still bump once every 24 hours)

Enhanced Reporting
Reports matter more now than ever. Whenever content reaches a certain number of reports, it will be automatically hidden in addition to being flagged for review by Staff.

FAQ (Overhauled)
Our FAQ is now properly filled with questions and answers for your perusal. Check it out for more information and specifics on some of our features. You can also ask your own questions that can be answered and added to the FAQ.

Featured Threads (Homepage)
We now have the ability to feature any thread in the forum which will be automatically listed on the front page. This will mainly be used for announcements, but we'll occasionally feature awesome threads by awesome people.

HTTPS/SSL
Antares is secured with SSL (Secure Socket Layer), a technology that encrypts all data between your computer and the website. It also allows us to take advantage of Google's SPDY technology to reduce page load times.

Levels
Just like Steam, we now have our own level system that is entirely dependent on your trophy point score. You gain a level every 5 points and the current max level is 50. The level system may change in the future as we tweak and balance it.

Live Updates
There is now a number in the favicon (small icon in the browser tab) that displays your alerts and conversations. This number will update in almost real time, so you can multi-task more effectively.

Mobile Optimization (Enhanced)
Our website is now extremely optimized for mobile browsing. All we can say is: Just try it!

Multiple Prefixes
You can now set multiple prefixes on Threads to help make your content even more relevant. This is mostly used for thread reports and the Creativity Center, but may be expanded upon in the future.

Rating System
We've completely replaced the Like system with a fully fledged rating system. You're not able to express a wide variety of opinions on content through this rating system, complimented by statistics which track how many you've given and received.

Restructure
Since we're now a multi-game community, Antares Forums has been completely restructured to reflect this. Each new game we support will have it's own forum all to itself. Our forums should be much cleaner and clutter free compared to our old ones.

Shoutbox
A much requested feature in the past, we now have a shoutbox installed in the sidebar as well as on it's own standalone page. It works just like a normal chatbox. There are rules related to it, however. You can unlock colored text with an account upgrade.

Similar Threads
Now when you create a new thread or scroll to the bottom of an existing one, you'll see a list of computationally determined related threads. The idea is that it'll help avoid duplicate threads and help you find other similar and possibly interesting topics to read.

Username Changing (Re-implemented)
On our old forums, we have a feature where you could change your own username without Staff help. It didn't really work. Now it does!

Weekly Digest
You now receive a weekly digest of the forum's most popular topics. You can unsubscribe from this automated feature by clicking "Weekly Digest" at the bottom of the forums.

Width Toggle
You can now toggle between fixed and fluid width using a small button next to AD Styler in the bottom left corner. Cool for those with super side monitors.

There's many other smaller features that I haven't mentioned here as well as a few easter eggs. I'll leave those to you to find. Overall, I hope you enjoy all these changes as they took awhile to get working properly and cost a bunch.

Cheers,
Kazyyk