- Thread starter
- Moderator
- #1
- Jan 26, 2012
- 995
To the MHB Community,
Today is January 26th, 2014 which marks the two-year anniversary of our founding in 2012. Thank you again for asking questions, answering questions, participating in discussions, providing feedback and suggestions to the administrators and staff, recruiting new members, and for being a part of our fantastic community during year two, as we continue to make improvements and make ourselves known on the web. As we did for 2012, we will now summarize what we accomplished in 2013.
New Features
MHB Awards
In 2013, we implemented an awards system that recognizes certain members for various things on MHB: the community votes on most of these. In addition, there are a couple of awards that the MHB staff grants. Here are links to the results of the two elections:
Forum Tweaks and Modifications
The admins added quite a few useful modifications to MHB to enhance certain forum features:
An active staff is crucial for the successful operation of any site, and we are pleased to recognize the efforts of our members and recruit them voluntarily into various positions of responsibility. During our second year, we made the following member promotions and badge awards:
MHB Ambassadors:
Active Community Growth
We’re proud of the fact that in 2013, the number of individual posts and threads is continuing to increase at an accelerating pace and the number of registered members visiting and overall users online have both reached the highest numbers we've ever seen during the past year. This kind of growth would not have been possible without your support and participation in our wonderful community. Keep up the good work as we make our way through 2014 and beyond.
Problem of the Week
In 2013, we celebrated the one year anniversary of our Problem of the Week. It's due to your participation that we've been at it now for 95 weeks (for the University Level and Secondary School Level) and 86 weeks (for the Graduate Level). On behalf of Chris and Jameson, we'd like to thank to those of you who've participated in our POTWs this last year; in particular, to regular participants like anemone, MarkFL, kaliprasad, eddybob123, Opalg, and our many other participants. We hope you found the problems to be interesting, fun, and even challenging at times. There have been some minor complaints about how the Graduate POTW is slanted more towards pure math than applied math, so Chris will do his best to find a balance between the two areas. Please look forward to the POTWs we'll be sharing with you in 2014. If you have any problems you'd like to see posted in a future Problem of the Week, you can always submit one through our POTW Recommendation form.
(continued in the next post)
Today is January 26th, 2014 which marks the two-year anniversary of our founding in 2012. Thank you again for asking questions, answering questions, participating in discussions, providing feedback and suggestions to the administrators and staff, recruiting new members, and for being a part of our fantastic community during year two, as we continue to make improvements and make ourselves known on the web. As we did for 2012, we will now summarize what we accomplished in 2013.
New Features
MHB Awards
In 2013, we implemented an awards system that recognizes certain members for various things on MHB: the community votes on most of these. In addition, there are a couple of awards that the MHB staff grants. Here are links to the results of the two elections:
Forum Tweaks and Modifications
The admins added quite a few useful modifications to MHB to enhance certain forum features:
- Thread author identification - Original poster, or "Thread Author" now indicates who started a particular thread when reading through it.
- Implementation of a $\LaTeX$ Syntax BBcode - Allows LATEXS tags to implement a vBulletin plugin for color based syntax highlighting of $\LaTeX$ code.
- The admins improved the POTW submission form and process - When you submit a solution for a certain week's POTW, you will now receive a copy of what you submitted via PM. Users can now use attachments with POTW solutions.
- We reformatted the forum rules. - The substance of our forum rules is the same; however, we have made them easier to read by having an abbreviated version called the "General Rules", and the old forum rules with all the explanations, called the "Explained Rules".
- We increased the allotted file attachment space - We have increased the total space that user attachments may use on our server to ~ 8 MB per user, regardless of usergroup.
- We improved the sidebar display - We changed the settings for this space to show which threads have updated most recently.
- We revamped user titles - The old system was rather a hodge-podge of themes; so we have unified the theme to the guild system (technically, Craftsman and Grandmaster aren't usually their own ranks in a guild system, but work with us here).
- We improved the toolbar - We were able to add some new buttons to the editor toolbar that weren't possible before. We added a "justify all" button, a $\LaTeX$ button, and rearranged and regrouped buttons to be slightly easier to use.
- We implemented user flags identification - Now when you hover your mouse cursor over a user flag, you see the name of the country associated with that flag.
- vBSEO abbreviations - We changed MHB's URL structures to make them more readable and more SEO friendly. Now subforums are identified by name rather than number and the "www" is gone from the URLs.
An active staff is crucial for the successful operation of any site, and we are pleased to recognize the efforts of our members and recruit them voluntarily into various positions of responsibility. During our second year, we made the following member promotions and badge awards:
MHB Ambassadors:
- MarkFL - March 15, 2013
- I like Serena - February 7, 2013
- ZaidAlyafey - April 9, 2013
- Bacterius - May 3, 2013
- caffeinemachine - August 9, 2013
- Deveno - August 30, 2013
- Random Variable - January 6, 2014
- Fernando Revilla - February 8, 2013
- I like Serena - April 15, 2013
- anemone - September 21, 2013
- ZaidAlyafey - October 24, 2013
- Deveno - January 7, 2014
- I like Serena - June 4, 2013
- ZaidAlyafey - December 30, 2013
- MarkFL - February 20, 2013
- I like Serena - September 9, 2013
- MarkFL - January 24, 2014
Active Community Growth
We’re proud of the fact that in 2013, the number of individual posts and threads is continuing to increase at an accelerating pace and the number of registered members visiting and overall users online have both reached the highest numbers we've ever seen during the past year. This kind of growth would not have been possible without your support and participation in our wonderful community. Keep up the good work as we make our way through 2014 and beyond.

Problem of the Week
In 2013, we celebrated the one year anniversary of our Problem of the Week. It's due to your participation that we've been at it now for 95 weeks (for the University Level and Secondary School Level) and 86 weeks (for the Graduate Level). On behalf of Chris and Jameson, we'd like to thank to those of you who've participated in our POTWs this last year; in particular, to regular participants like anemone, MarkFL, kaliprasad, eddybob123, Opalg, and our many other participants. We hope you found the problems to be interesting, fun, and even challenging at times. There have been some minor complaints about how the Graduate POTW is slanted more towards pure math than applied math, so Chris will do his best to find a balance between the two areas. Please look forward to the POTWs we'll be sharing with you in 2014. If you have any problems you'd like to see posted in a future Problem of the Week, you can always submit one through our POTW Recommendation form.
(continued in the next post)