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Dearest Members & Visitors to the little Fountain Pen Nut house on the digital prairie,
New Search Engine
As many of you are probably aware, the search engine of FPN is not the most powerful of all, essentially because it makes use of resources on our somewhat limited server only.
You will be pleased to hear that you now can use an integrated version of Google Search here on FPN, which has been set up as the standard search engine, within the FPN Search facility. The normal search engine is still available too, you just need to click on any of the other options available. You will notice that searching is much faster, and will also allow searching on small words and character combinations which weren't possible at all before 
.
In short, Google with all its power right here on FPN .
Small Changes to Forum Layout
The premium Accounts options have proved to be a great success, as we can now fully pay for hosting, licenses and support from donations received and Premium Accounts revenues. This is great news indeed.
Having said this, the however follows immediately after, of course 
. As you also may have noticed, the board is really slow these days. We have a lot of simultaneous visitors, which is good, but it does mean our server is running on its toes all the time.
In order to get any better response time, faster page load speeds and such, we need to upgrade. Therefore, we wanted to bring The Mall, the forum specifically dedicated to our Premium Account holders, to the fore, to encourage its use and to encourage the use of Ruby, Emerald and Diamond memberships.
We have taken bringing The Mall to the fore literally, by moving up the forum to first spot in the Marketing & Sales category, and by moving up the entire category to its new place, right underneath the General Pen Topics Category. Please keep on frequenting it, it has grown quite a bit since its inception, take out a Premium Account yourself , or even both 
. The more Premium Account holders, the merrier, and it will also make it possible to improve the service for our Community, such as a much needed upgrade of our hosting package.
We have also removed one of the two Classifieds links, as only one is really needed after all, and we moved one no longer active forum to History - it served its purposes (FPN LE Pens).
Donations
We have also found a solution for some of the problems we encountered with a new donation option, namely that of the Iridium Supporter, which was discussed in Community Feedback. So over the next few days, or possibly even sooner, we will enable this option too. Effectively it means one can donate and make that visible, by a new Group logo, a special badge on each post, and an Iridium background to one's Member ID (user name) in the list(s) of browsing users. Furthermore, PM box will be twice its normal size for the group of supporters as a thank you for supporting us. The extra indicators and the increased size of the PM box will stay for a period of 6 months after the donation. It will still be possible to donate the normal way too, for those who want to stay anonymous. Those of you who donated in the last 6 months and want to make use of this option too, may contact me so I can activate these extras for you too.
Do note that the Iridium Donation option will only be available for Gold Members due to restrictions in the software.
Anyway, so far these updates. Enjoy!
Warmest regards, Wim
On behalf of
The FPN Admin and Moderator Team
