Hello community,

Today is an exciting day for us. We have finally released our new UGX-Mods Forum as Open Beta to everyone.

Simply head over to https://beta.ugx-mods.com to get started - be sure to give us feedback (see below) so that we can improve it before it goes live on our main domain (production).

Please note: Your user settings won't be carried over, so beta and non beta (production) won't share the same settings.
This also effects some forum settings and statistics like total forum user count and such.

Other than that, Beta and Production share the same data and you are free to use Beta as long the Open Beta goes.

You can also share beta links, once we move out we simply redirect the links to the correct site

Before we dive into the major changes, let's talk about you and your privacy first!

GDPR | Your privacy

You probably received dozens of emails about Privacy Policy changes and such. Well we updated our as well!
We refined it and made it more transparent. We also respect the EU GDPR and apply the changes and features to everyone including non EU citizens.
We face one big issue: Currently only https://beta.ugx-mods.com has these changes!
We try to get out of the Open Beta as fast as possible but we believe it will take up to two weeks before we can do that.
If you have any GDPR related concerns, simply use https://beta.ugx-mods.com which has all changes to comply with GDPR already.
We most likey will refine our Privacy Policy further and require your consent soon again - we are no experts

Major changes in Open Beta

The work began 2 long years ago and we added and improved a lot since then. Here some major highlights but there is a lot more:

• New HTML5 theme which is responsive and mobile ready (now you can browse on your phone without issues!)
• New HTML Text Edtior (CKEditor) for creating and editing your topics and replies.
  • New gallery and slider options for images
  • Easy media emebed with iframely, simply paste a link into the editor and magic happens
  • Autocomplete for emotes and widgets (try to type in : ) or #UGX and see what happens)
• Improved registration process for new users
  • Better client side validation (in general this effects many areas)
  • Email validation (no more typos and support requests)
  • Email registration check → we let you know about your status of your email
• Beautiful HTML emails with nice links 
• Connect and authenticate with your social accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, Steam, etc.
  • Discord connection with our UGX Discord. Link your account and sync your forum groups with your Discord Account
    (you'll also receive the UGX Member role in Discord)
• New Avatars and Usercard functionality
  • shows online state of user (green or red for online / offline) - in the future we want to extend this with the UGX Launcher.
  • click on any avatar to show the Usercard, to get more information about an user.
  • more avatar visibility! Yup we added support for your avatar to be displayed in many new places on the site.
• Forum Index improvements
  • Child Boards can be viewed and entered directly from the index
• Message index improvements
  • Preview of posts without navigating to the post (first and last message are shown)
• Personal Messages improvements (mostly design)
• Adding our very own blog which UGX-Mods doesn't use yet due to not enough time atm
• User Interface improvements
  • new modern blue look
  • Custom dropdowns, checkboxes and radioboxes
  • better error, info, warning display
• Offline mode & better caching
  • smaller total load helps to reduce bandwidth
  • in case you go offline the site shows a nicer offline site (great for mobile devices on the go)
• Alerts
  • receive alerts & desktop notifications for subscribed boards / topics and other actions
  • The sound and the desktop notification can be disabled in your settings!
• SEO improvements
  • link any ugx-mods.com url in Discord and such to show a nice preview. Forum posts actually show the first image if available
  • nicer URLs (with page title, etc.)
  • (lot of internal work has been made)
• New landing page available under https://beta.ugx-mods.com which will unite all our sites and with information about UGX-Mods.
• UGX Roadmap at https://beta.ugx-mods.com/roadmap
• GDPR improvements
  • privacy settings
  • export personal data

If you are interested in all changes, read all changelogs here or on our website in the changelog sidebar (footer and header).
We are waiting for your feedback / issue reports now, simply checkout the ugx-beta-feedback room on Discord or on our Forum https://beta.ugx-mods.com/forum/ugx-mods-beta-forum/98 and let us know about your issues or feature / improvements requests.

You can also write here directly on this announcement.

We evaluate your feedback and put it into our development roadmap. Hopefully you are excited with the new forum and everything works out smoothly.
That would mean that production would be soon ready for the new forum theme.

It has been a long journey for me (Delta) and I'm personally very excited to share with everyone my work