As I'm sure you've noticed, open.neurostechnology.com has been undergoing changes over the past few days. Most notably, we're (finally) running on Drupal 5.1, which comes with several very important improvements. The new version of Drupal frees us to explore a number of promising new methods of creating, organizing, and delivering information, both within the developer community and to the Neuros user base as a whole. Ultra-top-secret plans¹ for these new ideas are already on the table, and I'm sure you'll be hearing more about them soon.

Some things were changed during the move, however, that will have an immediate impact on how you use this site. Of interest:

• The design of this site will be radically changed soon. Glaring graphical glitches should be reported, but a few minor annoyances here and there will go away once the design is complete.
• To protect this site and its users, everything but the plain-text input format a restricted version of Textile has been disabled for anonymous posts. The full version of Textile², a natural markup language, is available for users who are logged in, although most users won't miss the blocked portions. I felt this was a fair compromise between the convenience of anonymous posting for people and the convenience of anonymous posting for spambots (which could easily abuse the more generous input formats).
• On a similar note, CAPTCHAs and proper spam protection are now in place and actually working. Some database corruption was preventing them from working reliably in the past, but that shouldn't be a problem anymore.
• Users get blogs! Any user may write content in his or her blog, although it's important to note that blog entries won't be promoted to the front page unless a content administrator selects it. If you think your writing is of public interest, poke someone on IRC about it.
• All users may now edit pages in the existing books, although organization is up to content administrators and developers. The wiki should remain your first source of information for now, though.

Please let me know if you're having any problems with the site or if you've got any new feature requests, either on IRC or with the contact form on my user page. I hope you enjoy the new and improved OdNT!

Steven

¹ Ultra-top-secret in this and many other cases just means that it's on the IRC logs and nobody's bothered to transcribe it yet. If you're curious, just browse the logs (in the sidebar at the left).

² One of several Textile references is here.