So,
The 'new' Helpline has been around for a little while now and most of you have noticed that the most egregious bugs were fixed some time ago. We have just released another set of fixes and adjustments. Here they are:
Due to popular demand, we have put together a hack-y way to allow for underlining text. To make something underlined, select your text you want underlined and click the bold button and the italic button.
Bold + Italic = Underline
We have lightened the alternating background color where you see the list of available topics within each forum section. This will hopefully reduce the strain on your eyes as some of you had noted difficulty reading the list there.
We made some fixes for users of Internet Explorer 8 so that you could use it without text appearing in odd places around the screen. However, the layout here is still not accurate and we will not be making any more fixes for IE8. Less than 5% use it anymore and that number has decreased by half in the last year. If you feel stuck using IE8 because you are still running Windows XP, we highly suggest switching to a modern browser that is capable of rendering modern websites correctly. You might try downloading this browser.
By request, we added the OP's location to the initiating post of each topic.
We applied a fix to the time stamp on each post. The time should default to your own time zone, an improvement over forcing everyone to use Pacific Time as it was originally. EDIT: There is a bug with the deployment of this fix. We are working on making an adjustment. ANOTHER EDIT: We've fixed it. All new posts from here forward should have the correct local time for you.
We fixed some sorting issues related to sorting the list of topics.
We have noted the lack of email notifications being sent to the OP of a topic when a new reply is added to their topic. This is something we didn't build into the new Helpline, but it is something we will be able to add later. By later, we mean a few months. Thanks for your patience here.
Search... we are still waiting for Yahoo/Bing to re-index the new Helpline so that the links to Helpline posts in our website's Search aren't broken. Yes, we have submitted our site for re-indexing. We have noted that Google has re-indexed much of the Helpline, so you might try going to google.com and enter your search term along with "rick steves helpline" in your search (or just used advanced search if you are familiar with that).
There are various other bug fixes and back end improvements as well.
Short of any issues that make the Helpline unusable, this is likely the last wave of updates until the next set of planned updates in January.