alien soup

The Characteristics of Water Water is formed of three elemental particles, or atoms, two of hydrogen and one of oxygen, expressed H2O, which is one of the simplest of all compounds. The three atoms are held together by two chemical bonds, thus H-O-H. Hydrogen is first of the elements with one...

Well, here we here, getting close to the end of another year at Alien Soup. We've gone through some changes in recent years, with a name change and new design, but some things remain the same. In particular.... still no advertising! (y) Every so often the topic about displaying ads here at...

The kitchen here at Alien Soup has been quiet lately so here's a list of some of the things being worked on.... :) This week we welcomed the ScaryMinds team to the Soup! As much as I love the sci-fi & fantasy genres these guys & gals love the horror genre. The forum software we use, XenForo...

Please give your opinions! Something that has been on the back of my mind for a while now is "Do we keep dedicated forums for Movies / TV / Books or do we break apart those forums and move the threads into the general Sci-Fi & Fantasy and (now) Horror forums so that everything sci-fi...

This weekend I've made some changes to the server & site to allow for much more robust searching. Previously searching was limited and it was difficult to search for short words like "MP3" or even common words like "sci-fi". :banghead: With the changes in place not only are those types of...

If any of your friends or family have been trying to join you for a nice bowl of soup here in our kitchen, well, whoops, registrations haven't been working for a bit of time. Turns out that our add-on for Pushover alerts was breaking the registration process. When people tried creating a new...

We've just added Sketchfab as a supported site to embed clips from, like YouTube and others. :cool: Sketchfab is a community for 3D content designers. When viewing a design that catches your attention, like this, just copy & paste the URL into your forum post and the item will be embedded...

You may have noticed that the default site theme has changed from the blue & pink magenta "Doo-Wop" theme to the grey & red "Detroit Steel" theme. It's just part of trying new things. Don't worry, the old theme is still available if you prefer it! :) At the bottom of any page in the...

Alien Soup (AlienSoup.com) was reborn July, 2015, out of the merging of Cool Sci-Fi (CoolSciFi.com) and CinVin (CinVin.com) Those sites in turn have had a number communities merged into them over the years. Cool Sci-Fi was primarily a site for sci-fi, fantasy, & horror fans while CinVin had a...

Due to the recent security issues with Adobe Flash we have turned off the 'Flash Uploader' option. This will impact when adding attachments to a post or when uploading files to the Media Gallery. The Flash Uploader was used for attaching/uploading multiple files at once instead of having to...

In the upcoming weeks Cool Sci-Fi is getting a new name! The new name is not ready to be announced yet though it is safe to say that it will still be identifiable as a genre fan site. After close to 11 years of "Cool Sci-Fi" why a name change? There a few reasons but chiefly it is to get...

In the days ahead visitors will notice some slightly older threads & discussions showing up in our forums. This is the result of us recently merging the CinVin.com community into Cool Sci-Fi. The history behind CinVin is a bit complex. :coffee: Years ago I used to have a small business...

As part of our recent maintenance a new feature is now available, highlight & select text in posts to quote them! :cool: If you have ever quoted a really long post just to answer a question from it then you already know how annoying it can be sometimes to have to edit the quoted text first...

As part of our site maintenance tonight we have enabled SSL here at Cool Sci-Fi! :cool: That means instead of going to http://coolscifi.com all of your requests will now be redirected to https://coolscifi.com which provides a more secure connection between your browser and our server...

There was some unplanned server maintenance done this afternoon around 2:45 PM Eastern. If you were online and got disrupted, sorry about that. :oops: We normally try to give advance notice of any server maintenance that would disrupt visitors and this one that was supposed to be a quick...

In the days ahead visitors will be noticed a lot of slightly older threads & discussions showing up in our forums. This is the result of us recently merging the DiscussionJunkies.com community into Cool Sci-Fi. Discussion Junkies has a bit of a complex history to it. It was a general...

If you're looking for the "Webisodes" forum, please note that it has merged with the "Television" forum. Television & Webisodes Thanks to companies like Netflix and Amazon both creating exclusive shows that will only ever be streamed and not "aired" on "broadcast" television the definition of...

We had to tweak the Pinterest "Pin It" button that appears in the bottom of every page. While working on some site maintenance I noticed that the preview thumbnail was missing. The pictures were getting pinned, it just didn't look nice while creating the description for the pin so it's fixed...

Today we have merged our sister site, A Walker Bit Me (AWBM), into Cool Sci-Fi. AWBM started life as a fan forum for the AMC TV series The Walking Dead and eventually morphed into a general horror forum. After more than a year of effort into AWBM it was apparent that the two genre forums, one...

Last year we rebooted Alien Soup with all new software. One of the big advantages we gained was that our site theme is now responsive on mobile devices like iPads and smart phones (most of the staff are Android fans but we do our best to accommodate iPhone users as well) without having to use a...