Because this is a fairly important update I'm going to be going over how it will effect you on the website without going into too much detail due to security reasons. And as a trend going forward I'll continue to explain how this impact effects the community.

Admins will now have the ability to change user emails in case you get locked out of your account and are unable to reset your password because you no longer have the email account you registered with. Admins can also help in a few other ways such as unsubscribing users from newsletters if they can't gain access to their account and need a quick fix. As well blogs can be disabled by an admin if requested. However, all of these changes can easily be reversed through your profile settings.

The biggest changes will be for admins to have the ability to ban users for major site infractions. Bans are issued up until a certain date. This means that bans will typically be for 24 hours or longer. A decision was made not to ban for shorter duration because bans are only to be used as a last resort and it will reduce the changes of a recently unbanned user venting their frustrations on the site. While I hope to never use the ban feature, there will come a time when it'll be required. If a user decides to create a new account there are other methods to banning the user that can be used which I will not go into due to security reasons.

Other actions admins can take is the ability to completely wipe out certain user generated content. These actions are extremely limited and in the rare case that an admin account is hacked the hacked account will not be able to use these tools on their own. In the rare case that these security measures are bypassed there are internal ways that your content can be recovered.

While this is one of the updates I don't enjoy doing it's one that will in the long run benefit the community. This will help clean up spam, floods, and just inappropriate content from the site. As well, being able to ban users is a requirement for any site as well as the ability to remove any potentially harmful content. There will continue to be admin tools added to better assist users in the future. If you have any concerns be sure to post them in the forums and I"ll answer them personally.