Summer is a strange time of year at, and on, Newschoolers. You all sound the death knells in the forums for the umpteenth year running (you know who you are), while we put our heads down and work on content, sell ads, update the site and in my case at least, go skiing. And we're all secretly praying that things will be back to normal come Fall.

This year, it's so far so good on that front (as always). Over the summer we've had @.Tom. and @TRVP_ANGEL working full-throttle on the tech side, bringing a whole raft of new features to improve the NS experience for you:

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Sitewide @member tagging

We've been wanting to do this for a while but finally got it dialed this summer. You can now tag members in comments, videos, threads and even within articles and they'll get an alert to let them know. Use it if you've seen a dope edit you think your friend (or even one of us) should see, to alert mods, etc.

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Top-rated videos - Filtered by year

Another one that's been a long time coming. We know how annoying it is to search for your favorite edit, so we've added year by year video filters to the top-rated section. I've been using this a load to find old classics already and I'm sure you guys will too. We've also added google to the search bar for when our own, admittedly dodgy, search tool falls short.

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NS Contests Are Back!

One thing that has definitely sucked on NS in recent years has been the lack of contests. There were reasons, in part technological and in part legal, but over the summer we've figured out a solution to both. That means rider contests (i.e. best trick, best line, etc) are coming back to NS this winter with cash prizes. The first is only a few weeks away, so if you're out on the beast coast, get training those rail skills!

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Ability to follow forums

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but you can now follow whole forums you want to keep an eye on and get alerts when new threads are posted within them. If you follow ski gabber then your phone is going to explode, but we're hoping this should make the regionals more usable again!

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Auto-embed video links

Likewise on the self-explanatory front... no more embed fails! Actually, we're pretty sure you'll still somehow find a way to fuck this up, but videos now automatically embed in threads and comments.

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Coming Soon

NS Park Guide in partnership with ULLR

We've teamed up with park mapping app ULLR to bring you a park guide on NS. You'll be able to use ULLR to list the features in your park and rate them, giving other members an overview of which parks are popping off, all over the world. The guide is launching in just a few weeks on NS, but you can start adding terrain parks to ULLR in the meantime.

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All-new BST

This is a big one and it's taking some time, but we are rebooting the Buy, Sell and Trade forum, adding loads more features to make sales smoother and threads neater. We want you guys to be able to find the gear you want and to sell it easily to the community. You might even see some ex-Roofbox Review skis in there one day... if they survive testing that is. Here's a little teaser from the alpha for you:

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If there's anything you really think we should work towards on the tech front, drop us a line in the comments and we'll see what we can do!