Major Upgrade Wed. April 27th

Jonathan and the Beta Testers have been locked away for the past month or so getting Version 3 of Blend Swap ready for you guys. I on the other hand really haven't done much because I run the site, I mean come on you don't expect me to work that hard do you.

Anyways, they've sent message to me that the new version is ready to be activated, so on Wednesday April 27th at 7:00pm CT we will be porting over the new version of Blend Swap. While this is happening Blend Swap will be unavailable. We have taken every precaution to make this transition smooth and quick, we're shooting for 15min of downtime to switch the entire theme but be aware that we might suffer delays and the whole thing could take up to one hour, but, considering how much we've stuffed into this version, even that is a very short time frame.

The new features include:

• Bigger text every where.
• New help pages. All you need to know about Blend Swap; your rights and your duties.
• New, clear, functional UI layout. Activities on the site are grouped in a more intuitive way.
• New sliding top panel with the latest site news and page menu.
• Cleaner profiles with direct access to editing and configuring it.
• New user ranking system to give you extra privileges after gaining lots of experience.
• New contact form on profile pages with configurable access (no more showing your email address).
• New index browsing by rating, most downloaded and license type.
• New Edit your Blends! We will open admin reviewed blend editing, a long waited and frequently asked feature.
• Comments linked to your profiles, make sure to be logged in before commenting.

I'd like to take a little time to address a couple issues on the site, cause hopefully I have your attention now and you'll read this. DON'T STOP READING, YOU'VE COME THIS FAR.

The new version of the site is hugely focused on you the artist. Why is this? We wanted to make sure that you guys get props for what you do, you're uploading amazing models for the community to use for free, that's awesome. In a world where most people wouldn't piss on someone if they where on fire, you guys are sharing your hard work and passion and you deserve to be rewarded. So we wanted to make sure to give more focus to you the artists.

We also heard your request to be able to edit your own blends, whether it's to fix a typo, update your models, or change the render image because your model has no head because it was chopped off by site cropping. But just like Uncle Ben says, "with great power comes great responsibility".

There is a number of things that will be required of you to be able to edit your blend entries; to give you a detailed explanation of these features we've posted a set of new Help pages for the update that should explain all the new features and their implementation in depth.

We are also getting pretty serious about your expected behavior on the site, so please go through all the extra pages that will be available after the update including the FAQ and the Terms Of Use.

Until then, wish us good luck so everything goes smooth during and after the update.