We're always trying to evolve MTekk further, so there's always more features in the works. Some might never reach the light of day, some might not work when introduced, and some might be very popular indeed. We try to let the users guide this as much as possible, and some of our most popular features have come from this!

Anyway, we have now introduced some new forums, and here's the skinny on them!

A common thread in the MTekk forums is "What's your recommendation on ...", which introduces a bit of repetition. Of course, the nature of forums makes this unavoidable, but we thought we'd see if we could make it easier to find what people use and would advise others to look at.

The Recommendations forum is a place for users to post their favourite hardware and software that they'd recommend. We're currently playing with its format, so at the moment it's a Post-only forum with no replies; but this may change if it would make more sense to be able to discuss the recommendations.  This is not a forum for product announcements or advertisements; we now have one of those, too!

The Announcements forum is a place for advertisements of new or upcoming products. We get a lot of these, and often they're posted without really consulting the site guidelines on doing them. We don't mind product announcements, but we feel there either should be a place for them or that we should review them before they're posted. We tried the second option, and now we're trying the first. Please adhere to the posted Terms Of Use in that forum, and we'll all live together happily.

And finally, we now have a dedicated Polls forum. We haven't made that much use of polls at MTekk until now, but I thought we'd give it a try. The forums don't typically allow anonymous users to do anything other than to browse, but this particular forum will permit anonymous users to vote. We've got a couple of polls in there to kick it off, so why not check it out!

Sadly, we have decided to retire some old forums. The Telstra, Novell Software, and Acuity CMS forums have been very quiet and not up to par with most of the others, and so we've taken the decision to lock them and move them to the "Retired Forums" category. They are still open to read, but no further activity will occur in them,

Thanks to everyone who makes the MTekk community what it is, and stay tuned for more developments!