Trains.com Web Site Upgraded
On July 12, 2006, Kalmbach Publishing released a new version of
www.trains.com. Trains.com is the web portal for the collection of
real and model train related magazines Kalmbach publishes including
Classic Toy Trains, their magazine dedicated to O Gauge trains.
Besides a major upgrade to the look and feel of the site, which looks
magnificent, there is new magazine subscriber only content. Fans of
the Trains magazine news wire who are not Trains magazine subscribers
will be disappointed to learn that the news wire is now only available
to subscribers. Visit Trains.com’s subscriber benefits page to learn
more about the magazine subscriber only benefits. There are also some other notable changes. Click on the link below to read the rest of this post.
Kalmbach migrated their forums to new forum software. The buzz
around the O Gauge forums was that the Trains.com forum was one of the
more difficult forums to use, especially when it came to posting pictures in a
forum post. Unfortunately it looks like nothing has changed in regards
to posting pictures because you are still required to host the picture
outside of the forum, i.e. at Flickr.com, and then add the link referencing
the location of the photo in the forum post. Otherwise, the new
software has a slightly better look and feel. By the way, all existing
forum posts from and screen names from the old forum were successfully
migrated to the new version.
If you were registered with the old Trains.com site you will be
required to re-register. If your email information was up to date on
the old site you will receive an email explaining how to re-register. If
you participated in the old forums you are required to "unlock" your
old profile once you re-register. Once unlocked, your forum profile
and post counts from the old forum are migrated. The whole process
went surprisingly smooth for me.
Another nice new feature is the ability to manage all your
magazine subscriptions with Kalmbach through your Trains.com account.
You are also presented with an "order history" showing you all your
order activity details with Kalmbach including magazine subscriptions, book
orders and PDF downloads.
Overall, I love the look and feel and the account management aspects of
the site. Kalmbach did a nice job with the improvements but I am
disappointed the new forum software Kalmbach decided to use is not
on par with the forum software used by O Gauge Railroading magazine.
Related posts:
- Classic Toy Trains Magazine Searching For New Editor
- Cool Site: www.toytrainsontracks.com
- Fred Dole, Editor and Art Director of OGR Retires
- LEDs
- To Bag or Not to Bag
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