Well, this is all very new isn’t it? Welcome to a whole new Sonic Stadium! This new version of the site is the culmination of many years of hard work to re-imagine our place as the leading portal of Sonic the Hedgehog fandom online. Let us show you around.

Before we talk about all of the different areas of the site and our new homepage, we should first explain exactly what it is we’ve done here under the hood.

What's Going On & Why?

Long-time readers of the ‘Stadium will know that, while we may act like one big site, in reality we’ve operated under two distinct sites - a news and information resource on the one side, and a community and forum on the other. This has been the case since Day 1 on October 24, 2000, when I started this site using hard-coded HTML pages for the news and a free ezBoard service for the message board.

In recent years, you might understand this difference as the Wordpress blog site (which we introduced way back in 2008) and the SSMB Forums (using a different platform, hosted on a https://board.sonicstadium.org subdomain).

I’ve never really liked the fact that there were always ‘two halves’ to the experience we were offering fellow Sonic fans - and so I began work to research ways to integrate the two once and for all, to provide one big unified platform for everything Sonic.

The result is what you see here - we have retired the Wordpress and have leveraged the platform running SSMB to fully service the entire site!

What Does This Mean?

What does this all mean for you, gentle Sonic reader / forumgoer? For a start, it means you can now use one online account for everything - from news comments, to forum topics, wiki contributions, community calendars and much more to come!

If you were sad about being unable to post comments on our Sonic News stories in recent months, I’m happy to announce that we have re-activated them on this new revamped site - and you can do so using a Sonic Stadium Account. That is what we’re calling membership of this whole unified site (if you already have an SSMB Forums profile, you have a Sonic Stadium Account!).

Having a Sonic Stadium Account also allows you to Bookmark Sonic News stories so you can be alerted of any updates or new comments (this is a site-wide feature by the way - you can Bookmark Forum topics, Calendar Events, most things)! You can also Follow other members and their content, @ them (like this - @bmn you’re the man now, dog!) and React to their content to show your appreciation (or confusion) of what they have to say.

We also introduced Achievements into the accounts system a while back, so you can use your Sonic Stadium Account to participate in events (such as the Sonic Music Spectacular 2023 and Sonic Frontiers DLC 2 Achievement Hunt that are taking place right now) and feel closer to the Sonic community.

And if you don't want to bother with a Sonic Stadium Account and just want to browse the site - that's fine too! Having a unified site benefits you too as we can use one portal to bring you news faster and integrate stories with our Wiki so that you can find out everything we've ever covered about a particular Sonic product or project in one place. 

The New Homepage

Here is a quick look at the new Homepage (on Desktop - the design will look slightly different on mobile but all features will still be present):

1. This is the main navigation bar, the TSS circle logo takes you back to the homepage from any location, while the search icon reveals a dropdown where you can search for content across the entire unified site (you can also filter which kind of content you want to search for too).
    

2. The main navigation bar. On desktop, hovering over one of these icons will reveal a sub-navigation menu (on mobile, clicking the section title after clicking the hamburger menu icon will lead you to a sub-navigation).
    

3. Your Sonic Stadium Account bar. Here you have quick links to Notifications (the Bell icon), Direct Messages (the envelope), and content creation (the Plus). Clicking ‘myTSS’ will offer a dropdown menu where you can further customise your experience on this site.
    

4. Theme Settings. The Paintbrush will offer a dropdown menu of all of the character-based Sonic Stadium themes we offer (you will need a Sonic Stadium Account to access anything beyond the default themes), while the Sun/Moon will switch between Light and Dark Mode. Every single theme has a Light and Dark Mode, and we think each one is super cool.
   
   

5. The Spotlight section. This contains our top four 'Featured' Sonic News stories, as well as one 'Pinned' story. These will rotate on a regular basis - most times the Featured stories will exclusively be the biggest and most breaking news, but the Pinned Story could be a feature highlight or some kind of celebration of a landmark event.

Underneath the Spotlight block, you'll find a series of sections that cover the main three areas of the new Sonic Stadium experience - News, Wiki and Forums/Social. An Activity Stream at the bottom of the Homepage will give you a brief overview of what the Sonic Community is currently discussing or being most active about. You can also check out the latest Status Updates on the right hand side column block (along with other things).

What Cool Things Can I Do?

The old Wordpress and SSMB Forum sites were brilliant at doing one focused thing: the former, reading news and features; the latter dedicated to discussion. With this new integrated site, we want to build on those two pillars but also grow a third way - community events, contributions and interaction. Here are some new ways you can use the Sonic Stadium that can help inspire you to share your love of the Sonic franchise!

News

• Read and Comment on News Stories
• See can see which stories you have already read (if you see a tick, you're up to date! A dot means there are new comments or updates for you to catch up on)
• Bookmark stories so they can be notified (as they prefer in their Notification Settings) whenever a new comment is made or an update to the story is published
• Send news tips via our Forums - and get rewarded with Achievements if your story gets picked up by the Sonic News team!

Wiki

• Browse our extensive Sonic Wiki database
• Create, Edit or otherwise Contribute to existing Wiki records - find Help here
• Write a thoughtful review and rate games / other products in the database (only available on some Records)

Forums

• Use your Sonic Stadium Account to talk about Sonic all day!
• Catch up on Community-specific Announcements that won't get posted to Sonic News
• Create your own ideas for Community Events - they may even end up being endorsed by the Moderation Team
• If you're all Sonic'd out, chat about Video Games or current affairs
• Share your fan works with the community!

Social

• Bookmark or Contribute new Community Events to the Sonic Calendar
• Join or Create a Sonic Club and be part of a sub-community of like-minded souls!
• Speak what's on your mind impulsively and post a Status Update
• See what the TSS Staff think is the best content across the fanbase with Our Picks
• Check out the main Activity Stream to see what everyone is up to, or make your own!
• See who's online and check who's getting the most rep with the community leaderboard.

Account

• Take part in community events and get rewarded!
• Earn Achievements for posting content and contributing to the community!
• Follow users you know and admire on the Sonic Stadium, and be notified of their content updates
• Swap your site theme - from the default 'Stadium' look to Tails, Shadow, Silver, Amy Rose and more!
• Set the Sonic Stadium as a Mobile App and get push notifications on your phone!

And we're planning even more to come...

Pardon Our Dust...

Integrating our amazing community and incredible news/information resource together has been nothing short of a massive undertaking, involving months of research, years of experimentation and a metric tonne of development. In order to do this, we essentially had to shunt the entire SSMB platform onto our main domain and move our old Wordpress to another subdomain. 

As a result - while we have made every effort to make this transition seamless - there may still be a few kinks. Links that no longer go to the right place, redirects that act a bit iffy, that sort of thing. We are also in the (slow) process of shifting all of our legacy content from the Wordpress onto this new platform.

Sonic News currently has all of our news stories synced from the start of 2023 - if you want to reference an older story while we work to restoring this content, you can visit our old Wordpress still at https://archive.sonicstadium.org/. For those that have the old https://board.sonicstadium.org/ URL bookmarked, rest assured this is still active and will now redirect you straight to the Forums section.

We're also going to tweak some of the design elements and terminology of various parts of the site as we get settled into this new home, so please don't worry if you see something look a bit different tomorrow!

If you see anything janky that isn't working as you'd expect, let us know about it on the Site Feedback forum here. Thanks for your patience!

Enjoy The Next Stage of the Sonic Stadium!

I hope this re-imagined site will inform and entertain you - and be a home for you to discuss, read and celebrate the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise with us! I'm excited with the possibilities of this new platform and where we can take the community with it. I have loads of ideas on the boil, and hope to bring them to fruition soon now that we've jumped this massive hurdle of re-launching the site entirely. This train's been running for nearly 23 years now, and we're not stopping any time soon!