We have rewritten the website from scratch to replace the old and clunky phpBB and Wordpress forums used in the past. The Download Database has been redesigned to provide more robust and rich features for members of our community to share and host files. The forums have been modernized to use Markdown text formatting features, as well as adding support for "Question & Answer" style posts to help users identify solutions to problems.

At this time there are a few minor features which are still in progress and will be deployed soon, but they aren't so high priority that we wanted to hold off on launching the site any further. These include:

• Improved Markdown features. We will be expanding the markup recognized by the forum to provide more feature-rich text options for users. This will also generally improve the way things like "code" blocks are displayed, for outputs from VBSP/VRAD/etc.. None of the existing or standard Markdown syntax will change.

• Minor quality of life or user experience options. We have tried to make the site as user friendly as possible, and we're still ironing out some basic user experience bumps. The site will be updated over time based on user feedback, so please let us know if you think anything could be improved!

Download Database Hosting

One of our primary goals for rebuilding the website was to revitalize the Download Database, the heart and soul of the ThinkingWithPortals community. As much of the daily activity of the community has moved to Discord, so too did much of the file hosting for textures, models, and other assets. However, because of actions taken by Discord as a platform - specifically disallowing "external" access to files hosted on it - the viability of using Discord for long term archival hosting of files has come into question.

With that in mind, we strongly encourage users to begin uploading any content they have hosted on Discord or other platforms back on our site, and make use of our file versioning and other features. We've written a detailed guide on how to use the new download database features, you can find it here as a Sticky post in the General discussion board, or a link to it in the site-side rules announcement.

Once some time has passed, we intend to move all files currently posted in the Discord asset channels over to the download database. In this process we will retain all metadata, including author and credit information; however, if possible we recommend moving your files over yourself so that you can have more control over the download page. More details about the automatic migration will be posted at a later date.

Forums

The forums have received some changes as well. Formatting is now done using Markdown syntax, which should be familiar for anyone who is used to Discord. Note that this may result in a loss of some functionality compared to the old BBCode formatting - this will be addressed in the future as stated above. The other major new feature we support is "Question and Answer" posts, intended to make troubleshooting modding issues more straightforward. Once a reply has been marked as an answer, it will remain that way forever, and since these forums are publicly viewable - the hope is that this will slowly build up an "archive" of modding knowledge over time as more people make posts and use the Q&A feature. Finally, we intend to consistently moderate the forums going forward in order to avoid the waves of spam that plagued the older versions.

Ultimately, we realize that many people still prefer the real-time communication of Discord, but we think you will find the forums to be more suited for certain use cases regardless.

Thank you for your support since 2007! We're looking forward to serving the community's file hosting and discussion needs for many years to come.