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@Velocio
It's not Vanilla, so it will never look and feel 100% the same.
Did the bugs bother you? Perhaps not, it was certainly usable. But the bugs and limitations did bother me.
The stolen bike forum wanted a way to be pinged when something was listed here as stolen. That wasn't possible under Vanilla, but I could help write something on vBulletin to help them using the thread prefixes to indicate threads about Stolen Bikes.
I need to do the voting for the t-shirts. There are no polls in Vanilla. And yes I could spend all my free time for the week doing it... or I could just create a poll in vBulletin.
The BBCode on Vanilla is a hack. If I left HTML on Vanilla (default) then it's pretty easy to write a XSS attack that reveals other people's cookie and can let you login as them and read their whispers. I turned off the HTML in Vanilla to prevent that, but the BBCode engine had to be hacked on and it was a mess. This is why the nesting of quoted posts was always going wrong.
The BBCode nested quoting did bother people. Once something was quoted a few times the indentation (using CSS) made all of the posts below a certain level unreadable on some people's browsers.
The Vanilla code had no caching in it. None at all. It was slow, and with only 50 people online it would slow down. Last night 190 people and search engine spiders were on at one time, and it was zippy... so we can support more people on the same bit of hardware, meaning it will cost less over time.
The Vanilla code never indicated who replied to what... just that it was the last post in the thread. So the really large threads were becoming a little confusion. Example, in the Bike Porn thread you couldn't be sure when someone said "sweet bike" they meant the one in the post before, or the one on the second page of the thread.
Searching wasn't accurate. And it was slow.
Pagination within threads was broken, and you sometimes ended up on blank pages where you thought you'd be on the last page of the thread. It was Vanilla's inline whispers that caused this.
Your email address was exposed. Spam magnet! Now it's not unless you choose to make it be so.
You can now send a Private Message (whisper) to multiple recipients.
Vanilla was a great choice to start the forum on, but it wasn't scaling and the bugs and limitations were becoming more apparent. vBulletin isn't as nice in terms of prettiness, but the technical side is rock solid. I'll get the tech stuff bedded in, and then I'll ask for a designer to come and give me a hand to get the prettiness up to standards.
It will be cool, really. But it's only just changed and I need time enough to tweak the hell out of it and get things feeling cool. On day #1 last year Vanilla felt like shit in comparison to last week... on day #2 of this you're all whinging, but hey, chill... give it a chance and it will work. And if it truly doesn't I'll throw open the thought of going back and you can vote on it (a poll! Couldn't have done that in Vanilla).