Early this morning I applied some significant updates to the Voice system. A lot of these are "under the hood" changes so you won't see much difference in day to day use.

The main changes are:

• The site now uses a high-performance cache between the main server and the outside world, and pages are served from the cache where possible. This only affects non-logged-in users. The cache is bypassed when you're logged in, and the cached copes of pages are flushed when changes are published. This will give increased overall site performance as well as the ability to cope with huge spikes in traffic.
• Users can opt in/out of receiving news emails (which only happen rarely anyway). See the Email Preferences page in your profile. There's also an opt-out on the registration form.
• Emails sent from the system are now always in HTML form with a Voice logo, and a range of opting out links etc.
• The site is now able to fetch https URLs (so the link checker will soon start flagging these if broken, and the feeds app can sign up to https feeds, etc).
• The ability to set up forums with public write access using a CAPTCHA to protect against spam. This isn't available to everyone just yet - let me know if you're interested in trying this out!
• Fixes/improvements in the email notifications system.
• Better support for portrait images - will make more use of these in forums/etc apps over time.

If you spot any problems or oddities please report them on the forums.

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin

You can already set up a forum on your site, which by default any members of your site will be able to post messages. Using the permissions settings you can also configure it easily such that any user of Voice can post to your forums.

The change mentioned here is only to allow anonymous posting to your forums, which is somewhat more risky (as it can attract spam postings etc).

Do try the forums as they are and see how you get on. If you're interested in allowing anonymous posters then do ask again afterwards! :-)

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin