Welcome to the BowlingFans.com's BowlingCommunity.com.

All the posts that follow will contain Important Announcements for BowlingCommunity.com Members.

Old announcements will be deleted when they become obsolete.

Please take a moment to read all the announcements if this is your first visit and don't forget to check this topic for new announcements on future visits.

Please Report Inappropriate Posts

If you come across a post on BowlingCommuity.com that is an advertisement, contains inappropriate language, is hateful, or otherwise violates our Community Standards please don't hesitate to click on the "Report" button below the offending post.

A copy of reported posts will be emailed to the BowlingFans.com Staff and Volunteer Moderators and if it is deemed to violate our rules it will be removed. All reports and any action taken is kept strictly confidential so please don't fear reporting a problematic poster.

Thank you for your contributions, your knowledge and your enthusiasm.

PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND TEAM MATES ABOUT BOWLINGFANS.COM AND BOWLINGCOMMUNITY.COM

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Members Can Now Add Items To The Calendar
BowlingCommunity.com members can now add Bowling Tournaments, Bowling Camps and Clinics to our Calendar by posting a message in our Bowling Classifieds forum and checking off "List as an event in the calendar..." and don't forget to choose the date.

Please note: The calendar is for NONCOMMERCIAL use and bowling events only. We do permit Bowling Centers to advertise tournaments and Coaches to advertise camps and clinics.

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Widgets For Your Blog
Add a free BowlingFans.com and/or a BowlingCommunity.com widget to your blog or web site.

The widgets display our RSS feeds which include the titles (and optionally a preview) of new posts.

See a demo here.

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Changes to Private Messages

One change I can talk about right now is the upgrade to the Private Messaging system which will allow us to increase the Private Message limits so you can have more concurrent private messages and add more members to the conversation. However, all idle private message conversations which haven't had a reply within 14 days will now be automatically deleted. So you will need to copy and save (to your computer) any information in a private message that you wish to retain beyond that. Tip: Use copy and paste and save the information in a Word or doc file.

We will get a jump start on the auto-pruning as early as July 15 so please be sure you have copied and saved any private messages you wish to keep.

If you have idle conversations in your Private Messages we'd greatly appreciate it if you could delete them right now as every private message adds up and as a whole they use gigabytes of server space. Plus their needless backup every night wastefully increases our costs.

Attention: Accredited Bowling Professionals

If you have more than 10 posts on BowlingCommunity.com and would like your title (i.e. "USBC Gold Coach," "IBPSIA Certified Technician," "Touring PBA Pro") displayed under your Public Display Name on all your posts we'd be happy to set it up for you. (See sample below.)

• 

So we may confirm your accreditation and set this custom user title please PM me the following information:

1. Your real Full Name.
2. Where you're located (City, State/Province, Country).
3. Your certification or accreditation.
4. How we can confirm that you posses this accreditation. (Include a link to your bowl.com listing.)

This offer is limited to USBC Certified Coaches, Ritger Certified Coaches and BTBA Coaches, IBPSIA Instructors and Certified Technicians, Touring Pros, and current and former Team USA Members.

If you have several accreditations please pick only one to be displayed. Unfortunately, there is a limit on the number of characters that can be used and it gets too unwieldy to list more than one.

Thanks to CoachRich for making this suggestion.

We're no longer officially supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer.

While we will attempt to make the site compatible with later versions of Internet Explorer (7 and up) we will not officially support them and we make no attempt to ensure Internet Explorer 6 or lower works. So, if you begin encountering problems here with any version of Internet Explorer please use another web browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari instead.

Please do yourself a favor and avoid using Internet Explorer! It's slower, finicky, doesn't play well with many web sites and is considered to be less secure than all the other browsers mentioned above. So why risk it? There is zero upside to it!

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Testing the new CloudFlare Content Delivery Network and threat blocking

We're testing the CloudFlare content delivery network which should help the site load pages faster. It also has an added threat blocking feature which stops malicious activity including: forum and comment spammers, email harvesting and more.

As the service is new, an extremely small amount of users might be incorrectly identified as a possible threat and challenged to complete a CAPTCHA form before being allowed to load the web site. These incorrectly identified users will be shown a challenge page with a CAPTCHA form which is used to verify whether or not the visitor is a human or a bot and it also is used to educate the visitor that his/her computer might be infected with a virus. However, no one will ever be prompted to download or install any software. All you will ever need to do is complete the CAPTCHA form on the challenge page...IF you should ever see it and chances are, you never will!

In the unlikely event you are shown this challenge page on BowlingFans.com, BowlingCommunity.com or BowlSearch.com or have any other issues with the new CloudFlare CDN please reply to this topic with any relevant info.

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Major community upgrade in the pipeline

Once again we're working closely with the developers of UBB, the software which runs this community, and begun private testing of the next version of the software. It's a major rewrite and at this point it's still rough around some of the edges so we're not going to upgrade BowlingCommunity.com to it just yet. As development continues we will upgrade these forums to it and you'll get to help test all the new features before their public release.

The new version will have many new features including some you asked for and a few great surprises. I can't say anything else now but you'll be very pleased!!

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Today we eased the rules in the Classifieds Forum so new members can post an ad as long as it meets the other rules. Previously, the rules required members have a minimum of 10 posts before they could post a classifieds ad.

We've also removed the restriction on new equipment. However, the forum is only provided for individuals...no commercial operations or pro shops.

So if you know anyone looking to get rid of some equipment, new or used, tell them about the forum. Someone's trash is another one's treasure!

Changes to Recent Post list in Sidebar
We're testing some possible permanent changes to the Recent Post list which appears in the right sidebar of all pages on BowlingCommunity.com.

These tests involve removing some forums from display in this list and also adjusting the number of posts displayed in the list. These tests are so we can find a happy medium which improves performance and speeds page loads and also so it isn't so overwhelming for new members.

To see ALL the recent posts, from all forums, please use the Active Topic links within the menu of every page.

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Forum upgraded
We've installed a security patch for the forums this evening. Unfortunately, it changes the cookie format used so you'll have to re-login even if you've previously selected, "stay logged in".

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Login issues after forum upgrade?
I hope you're not having any trouble logging in to the forums and we're very sorry if you are!

Here's a few tips that might help:

Your username is typically your first and last name.
Your username is usually different from your Public Display name.
Your username is always CaSe sensitive.
For most users it does not include any spaces (unless you registered about 3+ years ago.)
It must be entered exactly as you registered with, making it fail if entered differently now.
Passwords are also CaSe sensitive.
You might have a copy of your registration confirmation email which contains your username and your password; try searching your email account for it.

If you're unusure about your username or are having trouble with the password recovery system please email us or Twitter us at @bowlingfans and we're happy to help you!

YouTube embed code vastly improved, support for Vimeo also added

You can now embed YouTube and Vimeo videos in posts using new shorter, less confusing UBB codes. The new YouTube UBB Code will also work with most YouTube style URLs such as:

• A YouTube URL copied from your web browser's address bar. e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3gjvOOlHmsU
• Or the YouTube short URL obtained from YouTube's “Share” feature. e.g. http://youtu.be/3gjvOOlHmsU

The new videos embeds are also larger, use the 16:9 HD aspect ratio, and allow you to optionally watch them using your full screen.

The new YouTube UBB Code is:

The new Vimeo UBB Code is

YouTube How To and example:
Surround either style YouTube URL with the YT UBB Code brackets: or

Either style YouTube URL will show up as:



Vimeo How To and example:
Surround a Vimeo URL with the Vimeo UBB Code brackets:
And it'll show up as: