We originally set out to correct this, unfortunately along the way we lost sight of the goals and started adding additional features that weren’t really needed to run a community board. We had a chat room, groups pages, events calendars, rss feeds, news,  and all other things that could be made more readily available on other sites.

This made us think about the actual goal of this site a bit more, instead of focusing on things that other sites did well, we should focus on the primary goals of this site. Because of this we have converted our main page into a sort of highlights reel. Anything that goes on around this site can be promoted more efficiently through news and stories. These stories will be written by members of this site as well as pulled in from the back end of this site.

When I say back end I really mean the heart of what this site is supposed to be about. Our goals led us to use a forum to help convey the community aspect of the website. With the forum layout, the articles, groups, events on that forum can be read by what we would like to call our “staff” and important and interesting articles can have their own place on the front page.

The redesign was a complete overhaul and I do apologize for the lack of updates to the viewers but the overall goal of the redesign was to simplify the interface as well as promote more people to get on and chat. We noticed that the primary users of the website were people putting on events. This was great, but there are many many other calendars available on large customer based sites that this service already exists. We are going to keep these services but really want to promote a community feel. This is why we chose to consolidate all of our features to two parts. The front page, news style website, and more importantly, our forums.

The forums will give a place for people to communicate with each other, discuss events, and groups in a simplistic open way. Before we had all these sections separated and the ammount of links on the page started increasing. This caused an almost clustered feeling on this website. To remedy this, we have consolidated our links to the basics. A registration page, a front page, and a set of forums with topics.

I feel this choice will improve how everyday users are taking advantage of this site. Before I feel that the primary goal was to promote, and we still want to keep this feature, but we also would like to promote use of the forum overall. Everything has been consolidated to this forum look to help facilitate this.

If you have any questions about this site, feel free to leave a comment on the article, or inside the forums. There is also

Voice your comment at http://talkspringfield.com/forum/store-reviews/whats-your-favorite-place-to-eat/

• The chat room now fully works, including a help bot named TalkSpringfield that sits in there 24×7 unless my server dies.
• A new review template. The link lets you just fill in questions about the business you want to review. It will make all the posts look the same. In the future I can use this to help make a search able interface!
• Ad Managment. Currently theres no ads but the google ones.. and only once per page if theres more than 6 replies to a topic. This is very lean, but as we develop sponsors, or just want to advertise somone it will be easy to do.
• Birthday posts. Birthdays are special. A bot will wish you a happy birthday via forum post..  We will also send you a email or just a personal message based on your profile settings.
• People can now add comments to your profile. This might be good for small reviews of businesses or just letting everyone know how helpful a individual is.
• When you first join, the bot makes a topic in the introduce yourself section. We really want you to say hi, thats the whole point of this site!
• Theres a TalkSpringfield watermark on all of the images added to our site if you use the attachment feature. This is just to let people know who is hosting it if they hotlink to it. Other sites may just not allow it, but we want to be as social as possible. Go ahead and send the picture to others.

We hope you enjoy the site and if you could, please!!!! share this link on your facebook to get us some more followers as well as registered users. Soon we will be able to allow people to register on the forum with their facebook credentials, but until then, we offer OPENID as well as standard registration.

New users can register with facebook (no usernames or passwords to have to worry about) and existing users can integrate their accounts to a facebook linked one.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to integrate:

Click integrate with facebook

Click Connect Now

Click Allow

Click Associate Account with Facebook

Click Associate Facebook account now! (we know this is a bit redundant but its facebook rules)

And you are all set, enjoy some of the new features of the site!

I present to you some new features:

• Mobile Phone / Touchpad Support
• A IRC chatroom
• Twitter/Facebook Accounts
• Small visual updates

First off is the mobile view. The Front page if you go to it with a smart phone automatically loads all the stories, now the forum has a mobile mode as well. This one has to be accessed directly. go to talkspringfield.com/forum and click the mobile mode at the very top of the page. Another way to view the mobile forum will be to type mf.talkspringfield.com in your browser (coming soon!)

Second is a chat room. This feature existed before, but we wanted a more open version. Having it hosted through Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a great way. Now you can access the chat with any client you want as well as on the website. We wanted to make as easy to use as possible but allow for more advanced users to have more options as well. Head on over to the chat via the link at the top of this page or by clicking Chat in the forums. We will be looking for moderators when the site starts picking up.

Facebook integration is on its way as well as twitter. You can follow us at facebook.com and twitter.com/talkspringfield. Tell your friends. Most of our posts will appear on both and we would love for you to share and comment on the topics

1. Springfield Illinois Forum
2. Springfield IL forums
3. Springfield IL Chat
4. Springfield IL Events
5. Springfield IL discussion
6. Springfield Illinois discussion
7. Springfield Illinois events
8. The best of Springfield IL
9. What is there to do in Springfield, IL?
10. What is there to do in Springfield, Illinois?

Hope we get some hits with this as well as the sitemap that is being generated.