Board software conversion and downtime!

[Paul Wilders]

Dear members, guests and lurkers,

Approx. 17 hours from now we are starting to convert from the YaBB board software to VBulletin board software.

YaBB has served us well for a couple of years, but taking the expansive and ongoing growth from our board into account, isn't suitable anymore.

Since we do aim to serve you all the best we can, we have decided to change board software. VBulletin board software has come up as the logical choice: professional commercial board software, able to cope with all aspects coming with a fast growing board and database.

Although we do expect this conversion will go as planned, there are many (unknown) factors involved. Since we want to be sure all is going to work out as planned, this board/domain will be down for as long as it takes - we do estimate this could be as long as several days.

Feel free to spread the word, as many will not read this post.

Although this move is intended to serve our members, visitors and lurkers even better, we do apologize for the temporary inconvenience.

On behalf of our team,

best regards,

Paul Wilders

[LowWaterMark]

The downtime for the conversion from YaBB SE to vBulletin was just completed a few minutes ago. So far it looks pretty good.

There are a few significant things to note:

1. YaBB SE had a concept of "display name" versus "real member name". The real member name, whatever it was is the only thing that could be converted to vBulletin and still keep the login credentials the same (same password). So, approx 200 members who were using different display names now have their IDs back to what they originally registered with.

2. Members will need to redo many items in their "member profiles", especially uploading avatars (which we did not attempt to convert), time zone offset and personal data.

3. YaBB SE QUOTE tags are different than vBulletin. You will notice that many QUOTE blocks are now broken in posts that were made while we were on YaBB SE. The contents of the posts are still there, of course, but we could not automatically fix the blocks themselves to make them look nice.

4. Some links from post to post will also be broken as the index page references are totally different between the two forums, but, significant threads can still be found by using the Search feature.

Those are the big items that we've seen so far.

Let us know if you find any significant problems.