We have a few new announcements for you today in our latest Bell Tree Direct! If this thread looks a little different to you, it's because it's actually an article thread, which is something we might continue to use here in The Bulletin Board going forward. For today's announcements, though, we're focusing mostly on events and the forum's board layout.
Celebrating Diversity Event Results
Starting with the conclusion of this year's Celebrating Diversity event, which recently ended! If you missed it, our event host @Chris will introduce this section with an explanation of how it worked.
Chris said:
The community voted for their favorites and the top six, which are featured below, will receive an additional prize. However, many entries were close behind, so I strongly suggest checking them all out in the event thread if you haven't seen them yet! Without further ado, here are the entries that had the most votes in the end:
Good work, all of you, and everyone else who submitted your creative characters in celebration of diversity!
Coming Soon: The Bell Tree Fair 2022
We're excited to announce that our highly anticipated event, The Bell Tree Fair, is coming back this year! For those who may be new to the site in recent years, The Bell Tree Fair is our largest event, which has many different types of tasks to complete and prizes to win. Unlike most other TBT events, we will even have physical prizes to win in addition to the forum collectibles and other online items. This year's TBT Fair will take place from August 6th until September 4th.
We also give a unique theme to each TBT Fair. For example, slumber party in 2020, retro gaming in 2017, and summer evening in 2016. This year's Fair theme will be... Enchanted Forest!
Let us know what you think!
Forum Layout and Board Changes
Moving on from events, we're also making major changes to several boards. After over two years since New Horizons released, it's time for a few things to be cleaned up to help things stay better organized.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf boards consolidated under the Animal Crossing category
Sadly, the time has finally come to lower the New Leaf flag. Maybe not lowered completely, but just a bit more obscured by the giant, high definition New Horizons one flying in front. All Animal Crossing: New Leaf boards will now be organized beneath the main one and moved to the top of the Animal Crossing category. Nothing will be removed, but The Train Station (AC:NL Online), Re-Tail, and Villager Trading Plaza will now be sub-boards under Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
Animal Crossing pattern boards combined into one per game
Instead of having two pattern boards for both New Leaf and New Horizons, we're combining them so that there's only one per game. The pattern gallery boards will be merged into the main pattern boards. All prefixes will stay the same, so you will now have two sets of prefixes when posting or sorting: pattern types and pattern trading.
New Neighbor Network now allows "looking for" threads
Our official "looking for" villager thread in the New Neighbor Network board was created to avoid a flood of threads looking for specific villagers. Now that villager trading has died down for New Horizons, we will close this thread and allow you to create your own threads for trading.
Nook's Cranny thread bumping time changed
Shortly after New Horizons came out, we realized that the Nook's Cranny board for item trading was far too active for our standard 4-hour bumping rule. However, we are now able to bring this back to the standard 4 hours used by the other New Horizons boards. This means that you should wait four hours or more before making another post to push your thread to the top of the list.
Pokémon Center, Smashville, Splat Zone boards removed and replaced with prefixes
Under Nintendo Treehouse, we've used these sub-boards for three of Nintendo's more popular game series on the forum other than Animal Crossing: Pokémon, Super Smash Bros, and Splatoon. However, we have now decided to merge these three separate boards back into the main Nintendo board and use prefixes instead. Prefixes allow us to keep all of these threads together in one place, but still organized by game. You can also click a prefix to filter only threads about that game.
More prefixes to be added
Beyond these three, we'll likely add prefixes for other popular games. Which games would you like to see with their own dedicated prefixes?
We've now merged the Nintendo boards back into a single one, but we'd also like to hear your thoughts about condensing the gaming section even further. Some time ago, Nintendo Treehouse and Gamers' Lounge existed together as one single gaming board. We'd like to hear what the community thinks: Should they be combined back together or left as is?
These changes may not be live as soon as this Direct is posted because we're still working on finalizing them.
Staff Changes
There's one more small announcement, this one related to our staff team. @Mairmalade, who has been a moderator for the last two years, will be switching roles to Project Staff. Thank you, Mairmalade, for all of your hard work moderating the forum and we look forward to seeing your friendliness and creativity continue in this role.
Free Bells!
It's been a while since we've given away free TBT Direct bells, but they're back today. You've earned them!!
Click here to receive your 75 Bells!
And with that, we've come to the conclusion of July third's little, but still exciting, Bell Tree Direct. We look forward to seeing you at the upcoming TBT Fair!
And Happy Birthday, Oblivia!
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All of your entries in the diversity event were amazing! I really enjoyed seeing and reading everyone's entries this year! 
Maybe we'll discover some new enchanted mushrooms or.....EGGS!! I'm excited to see what the Fair has in "spore" for us 
thank you, staff!
