Howdy. Quite a few changes are afoot this month, with several areas of the Network getting an overhaul. Welcome to Version 4.0.

1. Forums/groups Many people were confused about the difference between forums and groups. We’ve addressed that by separating them out. For the groups that had unrestricted access, we’ve lopped off the group profile page and condensed things down to just the discussion forums. So if you go to any forum (for example, the science blogging forum), you won’t find any extraneous pages—just the chatter.

Groups with restricted access (called ‘members-only groups’) are what you’ll find now on the Groups page. These are intended for labs, societies and other institutions, rather than free-for-anyone areas. Private groups will, of course, remain private.

It sounds more complicated than it is—the best thing to do, if you’re interested, is just have a play around.

2. Local hubs We’ve given these a fresh new look.

– One forum to rule them all. Previously, local hubs had multiple groups and forums. These were little used, so we’ve decluttered the hub by moving them up to the ‘global’ level. There’s now just one, very obvious forum on the local homepage. Please feel free to contribute topics.

– We’ve made it look all spangly.

– News articles are gone—well, archived onto the hub blog.

3. Video You’ll all be pleased to know that you can now insert video code from third party site like YouTube into blogs and forums.

4. Most importantly, my blog (and Corie’s) now appear on the Global blogs page. Woo!

We’ve already spotted a new bug, though. The link to the global blogs RSS feed may be broken. Please resubscribe if this is the case. Sorry about that!