Change your password in Edit profile. If you joined with Facebook, you can set one there too.
Forgot your password? After the emailed login link you go straight to setting a new one, without needing the old one.
Sellers can change their password in their settings.
Rig photos
A rig can now have 120 photos instead of 30.
Every rig has its own Photos page: add several at once and watch them upload, make one the cover, hide some from others, or delete them. Newest come first.
“Add photos” on the build sheet and on the garage card opens an upload window right there. Pick or drop several, see the progress on each, and the Gears you earned when it’s done. Closing the window keeps the uploads going.
The build sheet shows your newest six photos.
Help
Two short tours: how to add your 4WD, and how to use the logbook. They open by themselves the first time you need them, and you can replay them any time from “How it works” or from Help tours in the account menu.
A new rig offers you the logbook tour once it’s published.
If your rig is two weeks old and its logbook is still empty, you get a Lightning reminding you to log the last service or fill-up.
Little things
The browser tab shows the old DownThunder bolt again.
DownThunder is rebuilt from the ground up, with a new look on every page. Your account, rigs, photos, forum posts and Gears came over from the old site, and you log in with your old password.
Here’s what’s in it.
Your account
Log in with your old password. Or join and log in with Facebook: if you’re already a member, it finds your account by your email.
Edit your profile, your pictures and your links.
The account menu shows your Gears, rank and Lightnings, and links to your profile, garage and settings.
Profiles
Member profiles with overview, garage, photos, forum and trophies tabs, your Gears up top, and your offroad DNA.
Hover over a member’s name for their quick profile.
Links to profiles, rigs, sellers and places shared on Facebook, Discord or WhatsApp show a DownThunder card with the photo, the name and the key facts.
Your rigs
Add and edit your rigs, with photos and mods, in a new form.
The form suggests the variants sold in Australia for your model and year, and fills in how that variant came from the factory.
Say what drives your rig: petrol, diesel, hybrid, PHEV or EV.
Every rig gets a build sheet, with your self-made mods and an optional AI polish for the hero photo.
More mods to choose from: ute trays, rims and towbars as quick picks, 34" tyres, and engine mods (turbo, supercharger, intercooler, oil catch can, ECU tune, throttle controller, air intake and fuel pre-filter).
Your garage shows each rig with its photos, its status and a quick logbook entry.
Rig logbook
Every rig has a logbook: a timeline, quick add, PDF exports, and a read-only link to hand to a buyer.
Member 4WDs
Search rigs, owners and mods, filter by year and state, see every fitted mod with a count, and sort the list.
“Rigs like mine” finds rigs like yours.
Photos
Albums and single photos work at their old addresses again.
Photos open in a slideshow, and “Show more photos” adds the next ones below.
Parts and sellers
Every part has its own page again, with reviews from owners who fitted it, and you can browse the whole parts database.
Filter parts by your rig, category, make, price, owner rating and brand.
Review parts, put a part on your rig in one click, and save parts and places for later.
Seller pages: search their parts, see their top categories, star ratings and owner reviews, and their store on a map. Cane Toad Equip and JK Warehouse are the first, with parts from their own shops.
Featured sellers wear a badge and come first in the sellers list and in part searches.
Parts sellers can sign up, edit their profile and store hours, choose which parts are shown or featured, and see their profile views and shop clicks for the last 30 days.
Places to go
Campsites, 4WD parks and tracks with a map and filters, and the most reviewed place up top.
Add a place with a pin on the map, and earn Gears once a moderator approves it.
“Add a place” can read a link or some pasted text with Claude and fill in the form for you.
Forum
Start topics and reply, with the new posting forms.
Old posts show the member’s photos instead of :thumb codes, and smileys turn into emoji.
News
Offroad and camping news is back, and you can send in a story for the editors to look at.
Gears, trophies and Lightnings
Gears stay as reward points. You earn them for posts, photos, rigs, mods and reviews.
Pixel trophies in a mud tyre, a badge next to your name, and a pop-up when you unlock one. Pin your favourites to your shelf.
The Gears tab shows your history, your trophies and the Gear shop, with effects you can wear.
Lightnings are your notifications, in the header.
Community
The members list, a leaderboard by year, and the sellers list, all under Community in the main navigation.
Getting around
A new header and footer, and one search over the whole site (⌘K).
New About and Contact pages with a campfire scene. The contact form reaches the admins.
Terms, privacy and forum rules rewritten to match what the site does now.
Every email has a new look, and there are new ones for trophies, a digest and a round-up.
The DownThunder Discord server is in the footer and on the Contact page.
Behind the scenes
Spam accounts cleaned out, doubled places and placeholder parts merged or removed (their old addresses lead to the one that was kept), and a new area for moderators.
We're not fixing bugs ... we're just making happy little accidents a little happier. Heaps of stuff happened around the website and it's way too much to list them all. But you probably have already seen that the layout has been updated here and there. The top navigation has moved way up top to make space for the breadcrumbs (which help you to find out where you are on the website). All our buttons have received a nice little polishing. The mobile view has also been treated so that especially the menu and the login section are fully functioning now (they didn't do so well before the update, hey?).
The Forums have gotten a huge redesign and so did the Locations-Overview and car profiles. Also your user profiles have a better time line view now (which we are still experimenting with). There are still plenty of little happy accidents left but we push through step by step. Hang in there guys! :)
Alright, alright ... someone (let's just name this guy `Ziggy` for illustrative reasons) said that white text on yellow buttons is retarded. Okay, we all know it's not. But to give this guy his peace I decided to change the design for that one person on this planet who didn't like it just so he has his way. Hope you're happy now "Ziggy".
*drum roll* Major Release of the new DownThunder platform. Two-and-a-half years of development and procrastination later and now finally able to ship this baby. Need sleep now. Talk soon.
This update will hopefully please a lot of forum users. The previous forum editor was not very intuitive in its usability. Backspacing of selected text areas didn't work, it swallowed whole line breaks and it didn't like quote blocks either. That now is sorted and we sneaked a neat update on how to upload images in too. Happy posting folks. :)
Wow, what a big shift. Apparently the amount of users visiting with smartphones and tablets has vastly increased. From about 36% of the traffic from last year to more than 60% this year.
Besides the upcoming major redesign of our platform we have also redeveloped the way our images are being served. Usually every user would get high-resolution images when surfing through our platform. But this can eat up a lot of data and mobile plans and it takes longer to load those images.
With the latest update we serve our mobile users images with a lower resolution (still sharp and pretty enough even for big phablets) and a slightly higher compression so they load heaps faster. Happy browsing everyone. :)
Looks like our server turned into the Bermuda Triangle and all our emails were sent into a hell hole never to be received by our members. It was about time to refactor the emailing class and change the way our platform is chatting with the email server (which is new now too). So hopefully our mails are coming through now. Otherwise we'll have to ship message bottles or send messenger pigeons. ;)
I gotta admit something here. I had sleepless nights thinking about not being able to give your precious data the security it needs. Well now I decided to do something about it. Therefore I installed an SSL certificate and enforced all traffic to DownThunder to be going through HTTPS. Now let's hope you and I can sleep now better at night.
Wow. Much space. Very fastest. So traffic. Many gigabytes. Nice space.
Oh jeezus. There goes the lunch money. We invested it into our own domicile because the good old webspace wouldn't do it anymore.
The new place is equipped with a dual beating system with several million mega hearts, 2 cups of RAMen, 100 Gigabites (as much as you get when you camp near a lake) for pictures (and all sorts of stuff that you just don't want to carry around with) and a lot traffic (oh irony. As if offroaders would like traffic.). We don't know much about this stuff but it sounds cool.
And again our hunters went out to take down some serious bugs. Comments should be fail proof now and the Gears you get for each comment you write are properly credited. We got a backup monkey to leht him watch after the Chief Monkey of Gears and if he's doing a shyte job we gonna fire him on the spot. Last Warning!
Check your privates! There's finally a solid Privacy Policy to let you guys see to whom we are gonna sell your privates. Just kidding. We wouldn't do that to you. We try our best to keep your data secure and only store necessary stuff that makes your stay here comfortable for you. :)
Maaaates! A small update for those who like to compare their ... gears. Just have a look into the mates overview and see who earned the most gears this month.
We also added an "About my car" section in the garage. Whatever you have to say about your love just put it in there. :)
We changed the way our server stores and distributes pictures. That way you get to see photos faster and use less bandwidth surfing on your mobile phone. There's still room for improvement but DownThunder is now a fair bit more responsive. Less facebook, more DownThunder people! ;)
This time we give iPhone users some treatment. With the new photo upload you can throw pictures from your phone into your gallery without any hassle. We work on a solution for Android users too. Just give us some time and ... heaps of coffee. We're working on that, promised!
Cheeses Fries! What did we think when we put up the gallery section? Anyway, we got that sorted for now. There's a new picture overview and something that we called "Staff Picks" in the gallery section. That means, whenever one of our staff is seeing a great picture, we hit a button and move it into the Staff Picks area. That way great pictures get their credit. :)
We also added a better video overview and cleaned the picture section. There's still some work to do with mobile devices and some odd picture sizes. But we keep that on hold for a rainy day.
The former forum overview wasn't really appealing to stay and have a read. We get that! Sometimes things just get created in a rush and released without having a second look at it.
That's okay, it serves its purpose at that time. But we will never ever accept given things. So we changed that for the better and your feedback tells us that you like what you see.
Same goes with the front page. We raised the latest forum discussions to the top and put Dan Thunder and his little explanation about what DownThunder is into the corner on the bottom.
That way it still will be visible but less annoying for the ones that have already read it. We polished a few things here and there too but it would be too much to write about it here.
Take your camera, jump into your fourby, get off the road and shoot everything that gets in front of your lens. Ah, don't forget and upload the hell out of it. We present you now "Personal Albums".
A way to store all your offroading and camping pictures on this platform. Let others browse through your offroading adventures and get them to like and comment your pictures. Go ahead! :)
By the way. We implemented more ways to let you collect some Gears. You make some coin if somebody likes ...
Annoytify! Yeah, sorry for that but we really think that's an important thing to shoot you an email if something is going on. But with a later update you will be able to turn then f*cking thing on and off as you wish. ;)
We went bug hunting and came back with some good shots. Picture upload has been fixed (it's a real bitchy one), making friends with others acts now less random (just like in real life making friends isn't a think you can really plan ;)).
Time to save some Gears in your piggy bank. With the new update you guys are able to make a coin here. The gears you collect will make you able to "buy" upcoming features and goodies.
