**Important** -- Our community update is tomorrow, a short outage will occur!!!

Major upgrade to the Painter community launching end of day tomorrow

We have been hard at work with a major upgrade to the Painter Factory Community, as well as the Office Community and the CorelDRAW Community. That major upgrade will happen tomorrow, November 18, 2014 and we are expecting the community sites to be unavailable for most of the day as we complete the upgrade. As part of this upgrade, Essentials Café will merge with Painter Factory, opening up the lines of communication between the two groups.

Other changes include: 

• Full responsive design of the site, so that it looks great on your desktop and your mobile device.
• Compatible with the latest generations of web browsers
• Clean & fresh new look and feel with a focus on your content
• Capability of replying to email notifications when subscribing to forum posts

Anything you've posted in the past, as well as your accounts and galleries, will be transitioned over seamlessly. Some content has been turned off if we noticed a lack of activity within the past year. If there is a blog or forum content you would like us to activate again please just let us know.

You will now be able to keep up-to-date with the community from any smartphone, not only iOS where we had a dedicated app previously. On that subject, our iPhone app to access the community will no longer be working and will no longer be available going forward.

This upgrade will also allow for greater collaboration between the Painter Factory and Painter Essentials communities, and provide you with a greater community experience, no matter what product you use.

The other change is that we will be replacing the support for NNTP access to the forums with the capability of replying to the email notifications. If you subscribe to a specific forum or discussion, you will get email notifications automatically, and you will simply be able to reply from your email client. This feature might not be available day one, but will come shortly after we go live with the new community site. The NNTP access to the community will stop on Monday November 17, 2014 in order for us to get ready with the upgrade on Tuesday. 

There are many more new things we will be able to do over time with the new Community Site, and we are looking forward to the next 100,000 members! Of course, we are always looking for feedback. So, if you have thoughts on the new community, don’t hesitate to share them with us.