Greetings everyone! We've got a bundle of exciting updates to share today, aimed at enhancing your experience within our community. Below, you'll find information on a range of improvements, as well as insights into the status of various contests and community events. Please take a moment to explore each section! 
Guest Site Access
A few weeks ago, we temporarily restricted guest access to the forums and site, necessitating logins or new account creation. As of today, we have reenabled access for guests. We apologize for any inconveniences that were caused as a result.
Emails and Registrations
We're pleased to report that our long-standing email issues should be finally resolved. Addressing these problems took significant effort, as managing emails can be quite complex due to issues like blacklisting by email service providers such as Gmail and Yahoo. Consequently, new accounts will once again require email validation, and password resets can be initiated via email, as was the case before.
Pending Account Validation
A substantial number of new accounts are currently pending validation. If you have recently registered and are awaiting validation, you can anticipate an email soon that will verify your email address. Once manually approved by an administrator after email validation (as an additional security measure), you will gain access to the site and forums via your new account. In the event you don't receive an email, your account may have been removed, in which case, you'll need to re-register.
Notification Preferences
With our email issues resolved, we have adjusted default notification preferences to minimize emails sent from the server. Email notifications have been mostly disabled, reserving them for essential functions such as new account email validation, lost password requests, and other functions necessary for security purposes. Most notification preferences now simply allow you to choose whether or not to receive inline notifications (that is, notifications that appear in the notification center of the forum software). To tailor your notification preferences, please navigate to your user settings by clicking here.
Quality of Life Improvements
We have implemented several quality of life enhancements aimed at providing a more user-friendly experience. Notably, we have lifted restrictions on profile picture quality, allowing for much higher resolution images. Time to finally update your profile pictures!
The key changes include:
- Profile picture photo limits have been increased to the following:
- Maximum file size increased from 50 KB to 1500 KB
- Maximum width increased from 150 pixels to 1000 pixels
- Maximum height increased from 150 pixels to 1000 pixels
- Total number of private messages (PMs) increased from 500 to 1000
- GIFs are now enabled in profile picture thumbnails (uploaded animated gifs will animate in the mini thumb on the board index and in other places)
- Maximum size of new posts increased from 50 KB to 100 KB (to reduce rare edge cases with very large posts)
Calendar Fixes
As some of you may have noticed, the calendar system on the forums has been fixed! This enables the display of birthday members on the forum index sidebar as in the past. Additionally, our staff team may utilize the calendars for events and contests, and we may entertain member-driven calendar event creation in the future.
New Custom Profile Fields
We have introduced new profile fields for your sexual orientation and pronouns, along with a substantially expanded gender field to accommodate a wide array of gender identities. These fields are entirely optional and support multiple selections. Feel free to configure these settings in your profile settings. Your pronouns, if chosen, will be displayed on the left-hand side of each post, alongside your profile picture, user group, and other relevant details.
Quest Club
There has been considerable interest in establishing a Quest Club, and we are excited to announce that Ether will be spearheading this initiative. We are all looking to finally get the ball rolling on this. Further details will be disclosed in the near future in a dedicated subforum, so be on the lookout for that!
Map of the Month
The Map of the Month contest is making a comeback! While Eddy has admirably led this contest in the past, low submission rates for the contest led to challenges in keeping the contest active. Shane will assume the role of the host, seeking innovative ways to revitalize the contest. Stay tuned for forthcoming announcements!
Thank you for taking the time to review these announcements and improvements! We hope to continue providing regular improvements to the community experience as we aspire for all our members to enjoy their time here on PureZC.
