Chris J

And there we have it, the Top Three have been announced. Click through for our news story where we recap on the Top 20 before revealing the final result. Find out who was voted Home and Away's Most Popular Character in our 2024 vote... Big thanks once again to @Red Ranger 1 for his commentary, and to those that voted in our eleventh Most Popular Home and Away Character poll.

It's that time again! Today we launch our eleventh biennial poll to find the most popular Home and Away characters, voted for by Back to the Bay readers and members of the BTTB forum. This year, all you need to do is choose your Top 5 characters from the show's history, and vote for them by following this link. Unlike in previous years, you can't vote on the forum itself, but you can still post any questions and discuss the vote in this thread. We will allocate 5 points to your favourite character, 4 points to your second favourite and so on. We’ll then add all the votes up and announce the results at a later date, with @Red Ranger 1 once again providing commentary along the way. Please be sure to read these few pointers before we get started: Strictly one vote per person, and you need to enter your email address to be able to vote. If you enter more than once, your most recent entry will be the one we count. We'll only use your email address to make sure your vote is only counted once. If you want to subscribe to our weekly newsletter full of Aussie soap spoilers, just tick the box and we'll add you to the list. Otherwise, you won't hear anything more from us. You need to choose 5 characters, so think hard. Both regular and guest characters are allowed. Please give a character's surname, as if you simply write down ‘Ben’ then we won’t know if you mean Ben Lucini, Ben Astoni or Ben Murray. If you need a refresher, check out our Characters section. Any characters who have debuted in Episode 8336 or onwards (airing in Aus on Monday 26th August 2024, and in the UK on Monday 14th October) are not eligible, due to the fact that these episodes have not aired in the UK as of the start of the voting. Please only vote for who you genuinely believe are the best characters from the show’s history – not just the ones you think are the best looking, or your current favourite! Voting will run until Friday 15th November 2024. Get voting here!

I've just significantly upped the storage space for PMs, so hopefully you won't need to throw anything out going forward.

So I'll hold my hands up – Karen Dean should be in there ? I'd mistakenly assigned her points to Karen Thompson when I was cleaning up the results, confusing myself after a couple of people voted for "Karen Dean's mum". She actually received two votes, both as the voters' fourth choice. She scored four points, landing her in joint 139th place. Karen Thompson only got 11 points, meaning she moves from position 92 to position 109. I've added Karen Dean to the results column, and she'll be added to the actual results pages once I've double checked that everything is correct – obviously it's affected the numbering of some of the other results as well. Oops!

It's that time again! Today we launch our tenth biennial poll to find the most popular Home and Away characters, voted for by Back to the Bay readers and members of the BTTB forum. This year, all you need to do is choose your Top 5 characters from the show's history, and vote for them by following this link. Unlike in previous years, you can't vote on the forum itself, but you can still post any questions and discuss the vote in this thread. We will allocate 5 points to your favourite character, 4 points to your second favourite and so on. We’ll then add all the votes up and announce the results at a later date, with @Red Ranger 1 once again providing commentary along the way. Please be sure to read these few pointers before we get started: Strictly one vote per person, and you need to enter your email address to be able to vote. If you enter more than once, your most recent entry will be the one we count. We'll only use your email address to make sure your vote is only counted once. If you want to subscribe to our weekly newsletter full of Home and Away spoilers, just tick the box and we'll add you to the list. Otherwise, you won't hear anything more from us. You need to choose 5 characters, so think hard. Both regular and guest characters are allowed. Please give a character's surname, as if you simply write down ‘Ben’ then we won’t know if you mean Ben Lucini, Ben Astoni or Ben Murray. If you need a refresher, check out our Characters section. Any characters who have debuted in Episode 7876 or onwards (airing in Aus on 8th September 2022) are not eligible, due to the fact that these episodes have not aired in the UK as of the start of the voting. Please only vote for who you genuinely believe are the best characters from the show’s history – not just the ones you think are the best looking, or your current favourite! Voting will run until Friday 18th November 2022. Get voting here!

It's official The date hasn't been confirmed, but Channel 5 are set to scrap Home and Away's 6pm airing later this autumn, with Neighbours moving into the old slot. https://www.backtothebay.net/news/2021/09/24/channel-5-axes-home-and-aways-6pm-airing-as-neighbours-takes-its-place/ The afternoon showings and 5STAR 'first look' will continue as they are.

There doesn't seem to be any issue with the forum itself, as far as I can tell. What happens when it "tries to attack your phone" exactly? It's potentially a rogue advert loading a popup, which shouldn't be happening - but if you can let me know any more details, I can look into it further. That's an odd one - I'll report this to the company that makes the forum software and see if they have a solution. Yeah, I get the resource limit error a little too frequently as well - I'll see what I can do about this. Yep, that was disabled for some reason ... you should now be able to go in and turn the option off

Apologies for that, hopefully the issue is now resolved. Just to reiterate Dan, apologies also for how long it took for us to realise there was an issue! I upgraded the forum software this afternoon, which resulted in a bug with posting - but as Dan said, it didn't affect the Admin accounts, so we were unaware anything had gone wrong! Happy posting!

Hmm, I've had that happen to me once as well, but put it down to a mistake with the company that displays our ads, as we're definitely not meant to have full page adverts. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, I'll look into it and try to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Sorry for the delay, both PMs and notifications should now be working correctly! Let us know if you're still having issues.

12 years! It's hard to believe Back to the Bay has been a part of my life for so long - I first started the site when I was 14, so it's unbelievable that a small fan site started by a young teenager is still around and thriving over a decade later. As Dan mentioned, the past year has been one of our busiest years in a while, with a brand new look across most of the site, and plenty of brand new content by our amazing team of contributors. It's already been said, but thanks again to Dan, Matt, Dean, Jen, John, Barbara, Matt, RR and QA for everything they've put into the site and forum over the past 12 months. And, of course, to everyone who's come before them - whether they've left us because of other life commitments, or whether it's been through more tragic circumstances, we wouldn't be where we are today without the hard work of Jeremai, Kat, Frankie and everyone else who has helped out over the years. 2016 should be even more exciting as we continue to grow, bring you new features, new content, new spoilers, and continue to have great discussions here on the forum. Thanks to everyone for visiting and hopefully we'll be here in one form or another in another 12 years!

It's a 'band aid' fix rather than addressing what was causing it in the first place, but I've hopefully fixed the issue. You should now be able to edit your profiles Let me know if it still doesn't work! Also, Zetti, you should be able to post your fan fiction without a problem now!

I don't add website links to my profile. It's that I try to add in something for my About Me page and tried to save the changes but I keep getting the error message. Is this still happening? I just tried editing your profile and can add basic text into it seemingly without a problem. If you can let me know exactly what you're trying to insert, I can try and figure out what's causing the error to occur

All the time as in once a week, or more than once a week? Unfortunately the new software is designed so that you have to re-enter the password 7 days after you last entered it, which I'm hoping they will change in the future, but it shouldn't be happening more frequently than that.

Hmm, is this still happening? It seems okay for me but can look into it if you're still having the issue.

Sorry for the late response! Unfortunately, what Dan says appears to be 100% correct, and is how the company that built the forum software intend for things to be - which is a shame! Just to check... if you switch devices, say from a PC to a mobile, do you have to re-enter the password even if you've previously entered it on that device within the past 7 days? As that shouldn't be happening.

Hmm, odd, that error seems to be popping up for a few members, but always for different reasons. Thanks for reporting it - I'll look into it and try and get it sorted for you asap. In the meantime, can you try removing any links to other websites from your profile and see if it'll let you save it?

What errors are you experiencing trying to sign in on old versions of Android, and on what device? It should work just fine, but if you're having issues on a particular device I can look into it.

For the old results issue, it's trying to bring you relevant results regardless of how old they are, so setting filters to show posts from the last week, month, etc should help you there. As for the error / no results, well spotted, that's definitely broken - I'll report that as a bug with Invision support and get back to you!

Thanks for the feedback everyone. It's great to see that most people are really happy with the new look Keep any feedback coming, it's all appreciated. Addressing some of the issues: ​Took me a while to work this one out, as it doesn't happen in Chrome - but I did find it happening in Safari. I've disabled it, so let me know if you still see it happening everywhere! ​There isn't at the moment, but there's nothing to say they'll be staying as they are. I'll be testing out the ads over the next couple of weeks to see how well they perform, and the whole forum needs to be styled to make it more BTTB-esque, so the ads may change or move around then anyway. It does indeed seem to be gone, which is a shame. Their rationale is that the post window is now fully 'WYSIWYG' (What you see is what you get), so you should be able to see (almost) exactly what your post is going to look like directly from the post window. Obviously this isn't 100% the case if you're using things like BBCode (e.g. [ b ]tags[/ b ] around your content), and I'll try and encourage the makers of the software to add the feature back in, but it's possible they won't want to do so Yep, they're indeed displaying at a lower resolution. I've discovered what's causing that issue, and will look into getting it fixed as soon as I can. Re-uploading the images most likely won't make any difference, so hold off on doing that and I'll update you as soon as I can ​

Speed I'm aware that the forum is currently quite slow - there is still a lot going on in the background to rebuild the forum's 1 million+ posts, so it may be quite slow until that's all complete. Until that point, all old quotes will be broken. Login issues You'll need to re-log into the forum. There shouldn't be any issues, but there have been a couple of changes to the way user logins work in the background, so it's hard to be 100% sure that things will go completely smoothly. I've enabled guest posting in this forum, so if you're unable to log in, please post in here and let me know the issue. Topic descriptions These are currently gone, but we're hoping to bring them back asap.

This may take some of you by surprise, especially the longer-term members, but welcome to the new forum! We've upgraded to the latest version of Invision Board, the software that has powered the Back to the Bay Forum since it first launched over a decade ago. Visually, it's quite a change from the previous design, but at its heart it's the same software you've grown to hopefully love. It has a much cleaner, clearer design, and works smoothly across mobile phones, tablets and desktops. The mobile version of the forum is now fully functional, rather than the very limited mobile site we previously had. I'm not going to go into a massive amount of detail on the change, as fundamentally things should work the same as they did previously, and I want to let you discover some of the changes yourself. So have a look around and please don't hesitate to let us know if there's anything missing, if you come across any bugs, or if there are any new features you've discovered that you really love! It'll be evolving over time, based on your feedback, and we'll keep you up to date with any changes here. Finally, the theme is the default one that came with the software, and it'll be customised to make it more BTTB-esque over the coming weeks. Enjoy!

Apologies for the downtime this afternoon - I've made a few changes, but I'm not too optimistic that they'll have made any difference. Let me know if you notice any kind of speed improvement, or whether things stay as bad as they have been.

Really sorry that the issues are still ongoing - it's very frustrating for all of us. I've not had much time the past few days to investigate, but am doing all I can to try and find the source of the issue at the moment. The issues are almost certainly going to carry on for a few more days at least, but we'll get there - even if it means having to take the forum offline for a day to move us to a new server. I'll keep you updated!

Unfortunately it seems to be affecting everyone at the moment - Dan removed the online list to see if that would make any difference to the speed, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. I'll speak to the hosts and see if we can find out what's going on. EDIT - I made some changes yesterday, so if anyone who was previously having issues has noticed it getting better, can you please let me know.