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 Magic Forum Personal is our entry-level discussion forum application designed for smaller sites with light to medium traffic load. Most ColdFusion forum applications available today are loaded with so many features and settings, not to mention high costs, that most small site owners just end up doing without discussions on their site. That is why we have designed Magic Forum Personal to target their needs while still providing a broad feature set. We think we have hit that mark, but give it a try and see if you agree.
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For the latest version of Magic Forum Personal, we went back to the drawing board, but, more importantly, we went back to all of the email our customers have sent us over the last few years. We wanted to include every feature request we have ever received for Magic Forum, so we started with a blank page and built this app from the ground up.
The most requested feature by a wide margin was the ability to register members before giving access to the forums. We have added that in 2 ways: Forced Registration, which requires someone to register prior to being able to post to the forum, and Forced Login, which takes that a step further and requires a login before being able to access the forum at all. Combine these with the ability to verify a new members email address prior to activation of their account and you can now tailor the amount of control you wish to have over your forum members.
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Your forum members now have their own profile area, which allows them to modify their personal information as needed. The profile includes several optional bits of information that they can provide about themselves, such as their home page, biography, occupation, etc., that is visible on the member page. In addition, there are the optional member signatures and topic subscriptions, which members may also manage from their profile area.
Also new to this version is the optional use of moderators, which can have complete control over messages posted to your forums without needing to have access to the admin area. If you want to check posts before allowing them to be seen on the forum, you can take advantage of the Approve Post function, and you can have your selected moderator receive an email each time a new message requires approval. From approving posts to editing or deleting posts with questionable material, your moderators receive a complete toolbox for each and every post.
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We have also gone back and improved many existing features. For example, the Magic Forum search function, which was very good before, has now been enhanced to be more accurate and much faster. You may search for multiple words at the same time, look for posts over a given period of time as well as in all or in any specific forum. We have also added the ability to use PHTML, or Pseudo HTML, in posts so that your forum members may add a bit of flair to their posts, as well as adding URL's and email addresses, without the risk of using raw HTML.
The admin area for this release has seen dramatic improvment as well, mainly with the move to our frames-based menu system. The number of features added for this release is way too numerous to list them all but here is a short exerpt of a few available options: Use PHTML, Show Stats, Show Moderators, Track Views, Number of Topics/Replies Per Page, forum wide Date/Time Display, Allow Subscriptions, Allow Signatures, Use of Member Levels, Allow Save Login, Check Member Email and many, many more. Check out the Online Demo to see all of the capabilities of Magic Forum Personal!
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While we have loaded this forum with dozens of features, there are a lot of things that we didn't add; namely all of the fluff that most forums seem to have these days. Avatars, Smilies, attachments, private messages, post ratings and all of the other stuff found on the $150 and up forums may seem nice, but do you really need all of that junk just to have a discussion forum? And do you want to spend that much for those things if you are not going to use them? We think the answer is a very clear no, and we hope you will agree that Magic Forum Personal is the best discussion forum available for $50, period.
If you require a discussion forum on your site but don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for features you will never use, why not give Magic Forum Personal a try. You can get a free, encrypted try-out version of this application from our Trial Downloads area. An unencrypted source-code version is available from our Purchase area. Why not give the Demo Forum a try and see if this Forum application will suit your discussion needs.
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