Thank you J~.
As of 5 a.m., EDT, the new message board system is online and operational. I have tested it a little and everything seems to work.
Let's decorate the place and see how it looks. You can upload your avatars by going to your
User CP> Settings and Options heading> Edit Avatar. Look in the column on the left to find the link. (See illustration below)
You can make other changes there as well. In addition to
Edit Avatar, there is
Edit Signature,
Edit Email & Password,
Edit Options, which controls a whole gamut of custom settings, and
Edit Ignore List. Hopefully nobody will need to use that!