Our New Message Board

On Monday morning, January 11, 2010, we updated our forums to vBulletin 4. This is not a trivial issue in the way previous upgrades have been. We actually had to rebuild all the styles and layout from scratch, and for that we have to thank Dustin Lawrence and Perceval McElhearn for their great work to make everything function as well as possible.

There will be ongoing glitches to resolve over the next few days. What's more, some of the options that worked with the previous software won't be restored until those modifications are updated. This will take a little time but I think we're at the 98% point right now.

If you encounter any problems, let us know.

Thanks. We're still fine-tuning, as you can see.

One feature we've just added is a "Share" button, on the navigation bar at the top of a thread. That lets you post the link to the thread on Facebook and write as Tweet about it. We'll be expanding that share capability as we progress, and there will be further fine tuning over the next few days.

Thanks, Mark.

We're still fixing a few odds and ends, but we're close -- real close.

Everything is there. You may have to search a bit differently, but we rebuild the search and all the back-end stats, so it should all come together soon.

What they did was totally revamp the style/template system and provided no way to translate. So to upgrade, everyone has to rebuild their forum styles from scratch and recreate their themes. Thank heavens our changes are actually fairly minor compared to some. Backgrounds, text sizes and odds and ends. Some people built all new artwork, and I don't envy what they have to do to make their forums work.

Worse, vBulletin totally threw out the license setup, so people with current support contracts have to pay for a full version upgrade when those support deals expire. The ones we have expire beginning late spring and summer of this year, after which we have to pay the piper.

vBulletin's programmers did lots and lots of revisions to the codebase. Remember, we aren't switching to new software, just upgrading to a new version of what we had. The downside was that we had to rebuild the styles (theme) from scratch based on their default design. But I think that it's in some respects better than the predecessor.

When you go to a new forum system, translation is never, ever perfect, and the pain and agony would have been far worse for us. Right now, I just have to begin to set aside the funds for the license renewals beginning in June (there are three, a month apart), but going to any other forum system would have cost roughly the same, and would involve lots more work.

Part of the speed increase is due to the fact that they optimized the code, and also what we did to make the theme work involves less graphic downloads to your computer. This is still a first official release of the software, and there will be another update in the next day or so, but nothing that will change what you see. It'll just be bug fixes.

I made a few changes in the setup. Try again.

It's all about thanking yourself, and heck why not?

We do have a confirmed bug now. Seems when a member has enabled the Visitor Messages feature, the About Me and Friends tabs produce blank displays when you check a member profile. I'm in touch with vBulletin support and our helpers for a solution. It'll be there soon, but meantime I wanted to let you know what's what.

Also, it appears that the text entry windows are shorter when you use Apple's Safari browser.