Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a new Arduino Community Forum, and it’s about to open.  We’ve been listening to comments and requests you’ve made, and have incorporated several of them:

* The categories have been rearranged and simplified
* We’ve added the ability to post pictures and video from YouTube, Flickr, or Vimeo
* Added better email notifications
* Added a new profile page
* Added a new help page for newcomers
* Added notification pop-ups when login to the forum
* Made the style compliant with the Arduino Look’n’Feel

About Your New Profile

The new Community Forum will include both the discussion forum and the playground. You’ll be able to login to both with one user profile. As we add new features in the future, this profile will apply to them as well, to make your whole experience of the Arduino site easier. You’ll see your login status in the menu bar, and if you’re not a member yet, you can sign up from the menubar as well. Members will be able to post in the forums and edit the playground.  When we open the Arduino Store site in a few weeks, you’ll have the option to register your Arduino boards with your profile too. This optional feature will help us offer better support, by knowing which batch of boards yours comes from, and other manufacturing details.  We want to offer the best support we can for the tools we make.

The new forum and playground will still be open to discussion of Arduino derivatives and offshoots as it always has. We consider those a valuable part of the community.

Your privacy is important to us. The new profile database is more modern and secure than the old one, and the interface uses standard HTTPS transfers so your profiles will happen securely. Most fields will be optional, so you only enter data about yourself that’s it’s useful to you as part of the Arduino community.  We hope this new system will make it possible to manage the community discussion and to support Arduino products better for you.

The Transition

In order to make the transition work well, we’re going to freeze the old forum and start anew with the new one. The old forum will remain open and accessible and searchable as an archive, but its content has not been ported into the new forum. If you have posts or items that you feel should be ported to the new forum, you’re welcome to do so. Having watched the Processing team make a successful forum this way, we felt it was the most effective way to upgrade our own forum.

Here’s how the change will happen:

* On January 24th we will freeze the old forum at 9AM CET/ 3 AM EST, disabling login or posting. The same will happen for the Playground. Both sites will remain browsable, however.
*  We will migrate all the users to the new forum. This should take several hours. Once that’s done, we’ll open the new forum.
* The new forum should open by the end of the day CET on January 24th, assuming a quick and successful migration.
* You will be able to access the new forum with the same login and password you used for the old forum.
* We will keep a team working around the clock for 48 hours to make sure things are working and to fix any problems as they arise