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I was hoping to get a bit of help with widgets, they were working fine when I was on 4.0.1 but when I upgraded to 4.0.4, they weren't doing anything right. My website is www.dsdatabase.org.

So I'm hoping to get two widgets, one for my recent blogs and one for recent forum posts or activities. Now when I was running the old vBulletin, they worked fine, and through the upgrade, they didn't look right, so I figured I'd just delete and put it back up to see if that'd work. Well evidently it didn't.

The problem:
1. For the blog widget, I get a preview now. When I went into admin CP and changed preview text to 0, it still displayed the characters, when I changed it to 1000, nothing happened, nor did anything happen when I changed into to 40, it seems like the widget doesn't respond to the configurations at all.

2. I was using the recent activity widget in the past I think, and it was quite simplistic and beautiful, there was just the title, thread starter, and the date of the newest post. No post preview, nothing. I'd like to grab that again, but every single one of these widgets seem to tie preview with it. What's up?

I've attached a screenshot of the old look, and you can see the new one on my live website www.dsdatabase.org. I don't mind changing how it looks, but what I really need to see done is removing the preview text. Posts aren't all formatted for this, so it looks inconsistent and ugly. I'd really appreciate any help on this. Thanks! :)
Attached Images

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