A whole lot has changed today. Not only did I get the site updated from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, but I added a lot of functionality that should make it a more friendly forum experience. And the new theme (the visual appearance) is supposedly mobile friendly.

The forums used to look just like some plain tables, but now they look much more like a modern forum that people expect. I added private messaging and email notifications (i.e. following or subscribing to a forum thread), which I find highly useful myself.

I just ordered the first shipment of silver source material to use for the first round of testing. With the price of silver in FRNs being near a year low at around $11/ounce, now is probably a great time to buy. However, this source for the milled silver has a markup of over 40% above spot. I think its worth it, just to be sure of the quality. There's also additional charges for shipping, so the markup is approximately 50%. Hopefully the markup will be lower for larger orders.

Dave Ridley put up a video of the prototype die set we are looking at: Ridley Report on Shire Silver

Thanks to Ryan for making the die set!

Because I log on to this site using an account with all permissions, I see everything. I see stuff that hasn't been approved yet. Thus I didn't notice that several of you have commented on things and the comments aren't showing up for everyone.

I have commenting set so that "regular" users can write comments, but they need to be approved before they can be seen by others. This is very useful in preventing spam, and creates a list of comments needing approval. However, I had forgotten, and hadn't been checking the approval list. This has been going on for months. Sorry.

This is just a friendly reminder that the Shire Silver Design Contest deadline is just over a month away. We haven't received as many submissions as we would like, and none of them so far meet the specified criteria. Please consider entering your own design.