Welcome to the new ZDNet UK community!
After over a year of planning, it's a huge delight to say welcome to the new site. You'll be able to see how the rest of the site has changed by exploring it - but this is a blog post, so let's talk about community, the one place where we know you'll have strong opinions.
Community has been at the heart of ZDNet UK, and it continues to be so. We remain the only mainstream IT technology site where any reader can blog and see their output appear alongside the journalistic output of our news and reviews teams from around the world. With each revision of the site, we're moving further away from the old world of magazine publishing and further into the interactive, search-based, user-friendly future.
Not all the features from the old community system have been brought across, for a number of reasons: they weren't being used enough, they had too great an impact on performance, they were hard to secure against the sort of sustained spam attacks that we battle every day. In each case, we think the result will be a better experience for everyone: we know that in each case, there'll be some disappointed community members who used and appreciated those features. Apologies for that: all we can say is that none of those decisions were taken lightly, and we hope the improvements outweigh the loss.
You'll also find the staff of ZDNet UK out and about online, and much stronger links between the site, the staff, the readers and the wonderful world of social networking. ZDNet Live will show a constantly updating list of what's new in community - and it won't be the last new feature aimed at improving the social, shared side of the site.
It's not secret that we won't have got everything right, though. Especially in community, which belongs as much to the readers as to anyone else, we're open to what you think and what you want. Tell us. Some things will be changing anyway, because we've found better ways during testing that we'll be introducing soon; some things will only become clear when everyone gets stuck in. Let us know. We'll be listening -- and talking back. Feel free to do the same.