I have been a little more silent than usual over the past few months - hopefully for a good reason.
I am sure many of you are aware of just how much I want to take this site to a place that better represents my original vision. For those of you who don't know, Specktra was established 6 years ago! Through that time we have done our best to make the right decisions regarding the site and the community in order to keep the site growing strong while retaining a unique, interesting, and informational atmosphere. While I think we have done a "decent" job with the resources we have, we have always had a strong desire to offer you, our members, a uniform site with more seamless functionality.
While we have excelled in achieving our goal for some areas - we have simply had to ignore others for the time being for numerous reasons - the most prohibitive being access to top-tier dedicated resources to make it happen.
I am very excited today to announce that Specktra has a established a developmental partnership that will take us from where we are now to something that will offer more robust functionality and a professionally designed experience.
What types of new additions will we have as a result?
Integrated Wiki / Articles, New Design, Centralized Product Database, Better Member Reviews, Enhanced Buy/Sale/Trade experience, Integrated member traincases, a new photo gallery that is tag-based so it will be extremely easy to locate photos you are looking for, etc
What are the tradeoffs?
Change is never easy. We all know that. Think of this as reorganizing your vanity. Things may be placed in different places but we believe you will find it to be a lot of fun to discover and play around with some of the new features and functionality with the new platform. What we are proposing here is a roadmap that will eventually take us well beyond the offerings of most other "forums" and a development team to get us there. Our goal is not to replicate the current experience - but rather improve it where possible.
Here are three examples of changes that could fall under the category of "tradeoff" for you.
No standard bb-code editor. It will be WYSIWYG only
No sort threads ability in thread view to help reduce clutter and # of links
No post icons to help reduce clutter
No images in signatures
When will this take place?
We have our launch date set for October 12th, less than a week away!
I appreciate you taking the time to read this and provide constructive feedback once the redesigned site launches. I understand we underwent a huge site overhaul last year, but unfortuantly it was never fully realized and I struggle to maintain the additional technology and compatibility issues that have arose since then on my own.
I can't tell you how excited I am to finally have the opportunity to offer members a site that actually fully integrated and functional and to have a awesome development team behind us fully supporting our shared vision. I hope you enjoy the features, and that this upgrade will enhance your user experience on Specktra!
Kind regards,
-Janice
I am sure many of you are aware of just how much I want to take this site to a place that better represents my original vision. For those of you who don't know, Specktra was established 6 years ago! Through that time we have done our best to make the right decisions regarding the site and the community in order to keep the site growing strong while retaining a unique, interesting, and informational atmosphere. While I think we have done a "decent" job with the resources we have, we have always had a strong desire to offer you, our members, a uniform site with more seamless functionality.
While we have excelled in achieving our goal for some areas - we have simply had to ignore others for the time being for numerous reasons - the most prohibitive being access to top-tier dedicated resources to make it happen.
I am very excited today to announce that Specktra has a established a developmental partnership that will take us from where we are now to something that will offer more robust functionality and a professionally designed experience.
What types of new additions will we have as a result?
Integrated Wiki / Articles, New Design, Centralized Product Database, Better Member Reviews, Enhanced Buy/Sale/Trade experience, Integrated member traincases, a new photo gallery that is tag-based so it will be extremely easy to locate photos you are looking for, etc
What are the tradeoffs?
Change is never easy. We all know that. Think of this as reorganizing your vanity. Things may be placed in different places but we believe you will find it to be a lot of fun to discover and play around with some of the new features and functionality with the new platform. What we are proposing here is a roadmap that will eventually take us well beyond the offerings of most other "forums" and a development team to get us there. Our goal is not to replicate the current experience - but rather improve it where possible.
Here are three examples of changes that could fall under the category of "tradeoff" for you.
No standard bb-code editor. It will be WYSIWYG only
No sort threads ability in thread view to help reduce clutter and # of links
No post icons to help reduce clutter
No images in signatures
When will this take place?
We have our launch date set for October 12th, less than a week away!
I appreciate you taking the time to read this and provide constructive feedback once the redesigned site launches. I understand we underwent a huge site overhaul last year, but unfortuantly it was never fully realized and I struggle to maintain the additional technology and compatibility issues that have arose since then on my own.
I can't tell you how excited I am to finally have the opportunity to offer members a site that actually fully integrated and functional and to have a awesome development team behind us fully supporting our shared vision. I hope you enjoy the features, and that this upgrade will enhance your user experience on Specktra!
Kind regards,
-Janice
and thanks to Janice for spending time sorting it all out for us! 
This is sad. Not to be whiny but it's so easy to identify people by their icons and signatures when there are pictures.
i love it here!
