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• #8
velocity boy Oh come on... it's not like he's written a Hip Hopera... he has nothing on In The Closet... nothing.
Surely he must have a midget *somewhere *in his house?
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VB Just wondering whether it would be worth getting a designer on board before the swap over to redesign, remake, the vbulletin version, rather than doing it as we go along. I know your initial attempt will be lovely, but is it worth having the conversation with some of the more web savvy designer bods to get it into shape, think of it like a channel rebrand, best to do it all at once, rather than piecemeal. Birthday party seems like a good time to grab some of them and discuss with them how to do it, obviously while still allowing plenty of time for drinking and dancing....
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But what will happen to the 'Whisper Me' t-shirts!! They will be obsolete!! I hate VBulletin - a lot of the things in your list are geeky things and don't really have an impact on everyday quick, fly-by user
You don't have polls - good!
You can't upload images and have to host them yourself - good, we can share between websites - I love looking over people's flickr when they host pics, that's what it's all about, linking sites and peoples lives with images, videos etc.
You can't see who is replying to who... as in, if posts 1, 2, and 3 exist and 3 was a response to 1, then it looks like 3 is a response to 2 and it's confusing on very long threads when people reply to things much earlier - That's the beauty of user generated forums - it's a big mellee, but we all know what's going on - there is nothing worse than seeing millions of different answers to different parts of a thread it's just too complex.
There's no mailing list, which means you can't opt out when I choose to dump the whole email address, and it means I get my gmail banned as I send too many emails when I do send a mail-out - this really isn't that big a deal these days - we've got a forum, no need for a mailing list really.I think all of the tech stuff is important, and I get what you mean about Vanilla being ok for a small forum, and this place is now pretty big. But Vbelletin seems like a backwards step when there are so many cool new apps out there that were designed specifically to better and simplify widely used web processes such as forums.... like Vanilla, so that you didn't have to know all of the forum tech-etiquette to be involved.
I can imagine that Vanilla is completely un-expandable and that VBulletin would solve many problems, but - Vanilla is LFGSS, and all it's shitness makes it perfect for here. If major problems arise we can all club together and get you Dave to write a bespoke forum - a bit like building a custom track frame - only with everyones input.... shit, I think that might not work on a second thought :-) xx
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i like tecno therads, they make me think im learning something...
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The best thing about Vanilla, and I hope can be recreated on this new system is the lack of separate sections. The use of tags, e.g. "classified" is much more useful than having to go into a separate section of the site. You just miss stuff in sectioned up forums. Using vanilla you can just ignore those messages you don't want to read.
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eeehhhh @ads - I'm pretty sure vBulletin has a 'view all' thing... might be wrong though.
It does.
But as I was trying to say to cornelius this evening, as we get busier the 'view all' thing gets tougher to use. Not many of us would go onto page 2 or 3, and if you're in a meeting for a few hours in the afternoon you're guaranteed to miss stuff because of the speed it turns over.
"View all" is great but doesn't scale well.
You should be able to choose according to the time you have whether you want to:
"View all"
"View categories"
"View all as it happens (live updates without refreshing)"
"View just the things you're interested in"Vanilla can't do that, vBulletin can do all of the above.
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can it all look basically the same, with same input? i'm too stupid to figure out a new system.
aidan
wheels
hippy
Evilmonkey
Nicholas
eeehhhh
cornelius_blackfoot
jonny
jonaent_(Jon)
chris_crash
addie
ads
rpm
hassanr
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About
vBulletin - We'll Be Switching Soon
Posted by
@Velocio
I can almost hear the screams of pain, "But we like this", "Vanilla is so simple", "But vBulletin is ugly", etc
But, hear me out here... the problems with Vanilla, let me list some:
[ulist]
[li]The page numbers of threads don't add up when there are lots of whispers[/li]
[li]The editor requires you know all of this bbcode rubbish[/li]
[li]The who's online is so intensive it uses most of the server power, limits growth (or increases costs as we grow)[/li]
[li]You can't upload images and have to host them yourself[/li]
[li]You don't have polls[/li]
[li]All of the stickies are in one place and take half of the first page[/li]
[li]The notifications are pretty dumb[/li]
[li]You can't find and search just your whispers[/li]
[li]The members page is retarded, unsearchable, doesn't show who they are, and because of the lack of pagination will have to be disabled soon as we're growing and that page is doing 1 SQL query per member = 1,600 queries for one page already[/li]
[li]You can't see who is replying to who... as in, if posts 1, 2, and 3 exist and 3 was a response to 1, then it looks like 3 is a response to 2 and it's confusing on very long threads when people reply to things much earlier[/li]
[li]I can't administer the forum... there are no tools to merge duplicate threads together[/li]
[li]I can't help people who are stuck, there's no manual way for me to reset a password as I was asked to do so just two days ago[/li]
[li]There's no mailing list, which means you can't opt out when I choose to dump the whole email address, and it means I get my gmail banned as I send too many emails when I do send a mail-out[/li]
[li]Hard to add custom pages, I want to integrate the stolen bikes stuff as well as add an area to give sponsors of events more exposure[/li]
[/ulist]
The list can just go on really. Vanilla is lovely when you're small, but starts to struggle when you're larger. And the bigger we get, the more overhead there is in running the show, and the more it becomes hard to follow stuff because of the pace of the front page updating.
So, we will be moving to vBulletin and it will be soon.
Once we have moved, I would like to get a designer to help me make it pretty. From day one I will make a half-arsed attempt to get it to resemble Vanilla in colours and header and stuff... but ideally it would look much better than Vanilla laid over vBulletin. Focus will be on usability, readability, ensuring that the key thing is the posts and the funny stuff and not the clutter of the forum. vBulletin design will be ripped apart and most of their icons and images will be ditched. There will still be no signatures, no smilies, no retarded stuff basically.
So this is notice that it will happen.
When it happens, you'll have about 2 hours downtime... so I'll try and do it when we're not too busy.
After it has happened you will need to re-upload your avatar. Currently we don't store them so I can't migrate it over... so make sure you have a note of where your avatar is so that you can upload it.
Your username will stay the same, and your password, and all of the posts, threads, whispers will be kept. Nothing like that will be lost.