All those changes I didn't do last week? Now I did them. If you go to the news, forums or weblogs pages you can subscribe to stuff. Once you've subscribed to stuff, go to 'My Profile' and you can turn on your subscriptions.

Once you do this, you can create your own world within this website. You will only see those information sources which you have chosen to see.

Oh, yeah... as a side effect there are now private forums - which you can restrict to anybody you choose, providing that it's your forum.

If you wish to access an information channel you aren't subscribed to, you can still do it through the forum, weblog, or news menu items. Just click on the name. If it's private you won't be able to click on it. 

You have no idea how much work went into this. I've convinced MySQL to do some very unnatural things that shouldn't be possible, and in fact weren't possible a year ago. I've spent a lot of time testing and debugging but it's entirely possible I may have missed or overlooked something. Please let me know via the 'bugs' forum if you run across some really weird badness or really bad weirdness - whatever.

If you don't use your own private subscriptions, you will be using the website default subscription list. This has some unique characteristics.

• It is refreshed only once a day
• On refresh, it will pick up any new weblogs and forums which are world-readable
• It will also pick up any news sources which the site admin has tagged as interesting.

There are a few side effects to these rules.

• If you create a new weblog or forum, it won't be picked up as a site subscription until tomorrow.
• If you create a private forum, it won't ever be picked up as a website subscription.
• There are a gazillion news sources, and the site admin (me) is not going to tag all of them as interesting. You'll have to subscribe to your favorite feeds on your own.

There's also a way around all the side effects. If you enable 'Auto subscribe' on the 'My Profile' page, your personal subscription list will be updated whenever you login - with any new weblogs and forums which you are able to access. You can also manually subscribe to any news feed with imported content. If you have a hard time with 'imported content' and what that means, don't worry about it right now. If it's somebody else's feed and the subscribe checkbox isn't grey, you can subscribe to it. If the box is grey, you can't.

If you can't subscribe to it, you can create your own copy of the feed and import some articles, and then you can subscribe to it.

Oh - and I finally fixed the bug that sometimes left your name lingering in a chat room after you left it.