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News Two weeks later ...

rconn

Administrator
May
13,015
192
Staff member
It's been two weeks now since I switched the JP Software forums from vBulletin to XenForo. For those of you who missed the earlier threads about why this was necessary (and who have a strong stomache for corporate greed and mind-boggling stupidity), Google "Internet Brands vBulletin".

I couldn't be happier with the results thus far. XenForo is 10x easier to configure, and now that I've gotten everything tuned up, the forums are running 270% faster than the best they could manage under vBulletin. The XenForo UI is much cleaner and easier to use than vBulletin, it abounds with nice little touches (like the Alerts tab), and I have yet to find a significant bug in the XenForo code. (A couple in the third-party addons, but they've been quickly resolved.)

We took a hit in the traffic and Google rankings after the switchover (due to the changed URLs), but we've already recovered some of that. And Google managed to reindex almost all of the forum messages in 10 days. (It took more than a year for Google to index the original vBulletin forums!)

I know there's a half-dozen users who are still upset that they can't respond to messages via email. But the fact is that the upgrade that was being forced on us by vBulletin would not only have resulted in not being able to respond to messages via email, but also in not being able to receive any email notifications of new messages. The current email notification system isn't perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than the only alternative (i.e., nothing at all). I've sent a request to XenForo for some improvements to the email notification, so it's possible a future release will incorporate some of the features you've requested.

If you have any comments / feature requests / bug reports about anything else in the new UI, let me know. (I probably won't be able to change it myself, but at the least I'll pass it on to XenForo.)
 
I've read most of the earlier forum threads, but I must have missed why the forum software change was necessary.

Was it due to technical or ideological reasons?

Did vBulletin forcibly retire the old (presumably) working version?

(ETA: No problems at all with the new forum software on my part)
 
I've read most of the earlier forum threads, but I must have missed why the forum software change was necessary.

Was it due to technical or ideological reasons?

Yes, and yes. It was crashing repeatedly, it was unsupported, and IB was forcing us to "upgrade" to the much larger, much slower, and much buggier new version, which would also have broken many of the mods we were using, particularly the email notification & reply.

Add in Internet Brand's (well-documented) lamentable business & ethical behavior, and my choices narrowed down to:

1) Pay a lot to "upgrade" to a mostly-broken new version (and watch the forums die), or
2) Find something that actually worked and was actually supported.

There was a push by a few users for me to switch to a $25,000 forum package that included NNTP, but they declined to help defray the cost ... :rolleyes:

Did vBulletin forcibly retire the old (presumably) working version?

Yes (except for the part about "working version").
 
If you have any comments / feature requests / bug reports about anything else in the new UI, let me know. (I probably won't be able to change it myself, but at the least I'll pass it on to XenForo.)

I saw a very very stupid stupid "issue".
Right now, if I look at statistics about users on line, it says
  1. Rodolfo,
  2. drrob1,
  3. googlebot,
  4. rconn
Online now: 11 (members: 3, guests: 7)
So, it seems that one of the members is not considered. Are You counted in a different way? I saw the same when You were not on line, but maby somebody else is parts of modarators.
I describe this because I saw that a few days ago there was a fake post, so I do not know if this has a relationship or not.
Regards
Rodolfo Giovanninetti
 
I can't speak to most of those issues, but the new forum does a much better job of tracking which messages I've seen. vBulletin had an annoying habit of showing me 'new' posts that I had already read, over and over....

Speaking of spiderbots in the 'Members Online Now' panel, if you click on one, you'll see the profile for one rconn. Odd.
 
The bots listing isn't a standard XenForo thing; it's something I added so I could track whether the crawlers were indexing the new forums. So I'm not surprised at the display if you click on one, and I'm also not particularly concerned about it. I'll probably remove it in the near future now that I'm confident they're indexing new content.
 
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