A Tour of PC World's New Forums

Our new community makes it easier to keep track of the subjects and people you're interested in. And its new reputation features will let you quickly find the most valuable comments.

By Curt Poff, PCWorld

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Invision Power Board

We've adopted Invision Power Board as our new forum platform. IPB's interface should be quite familiar to veteran forum users and newbies alike. It contains user-friendly tools for managing friends and private communications.

Reputation

Think someone made a great point (or a lousy one)? You can now rate comments up or down, giving reputation points to the author. Those reputation points will be reflected on the user’s profile. You can filter comments based on a user's reputation, too, ensuring that you see only posts that other members have found valuable.

Friends and Ignored Users

If you really connect with another PC World member, you can add him or her as a friend, making quick communication easier. You'll be able to find your friends in a flash, because they'll be highlighted in your profile. And if a member's comments really bug you (there's one in every community), you can choose to hide all content from that user by adding him or her to your Ignored list.

Private Messages

Personal conversations allow you to send messages directly to other members, out of public view, in a topic format.

Watch Content

You can monitor topics or entire categories with a single click. The forums index page contains a box that loads your selected content for quick access.

Documents Wiki

We've moved documents on PC World into Media Wiki. Using the same account log-in you use for the PC World site and forums, you can browse and contribute to existing how-to and help documents. Media Wiki employs the standard wiki formatting that Wikipedia made famous.