Forum Software Update - Has Been Done

Very soon!

Much like the last downtime, when I moved the forum to a new hosting company, I've got a short date on another upcoming downtime.

This time I'll be converting the forum to new forum software. We'll be moving from vBulletin 3 series to the latest release of a fairly new forum software called XenForo.

This is the company's own website using the default skin and configs: http://xenforo.com/community/

Now, many people probably thought my position on leaving vB3 was something like "prying it from my cold dead hands." And, for a long while, that was my position. However, in the last few months, I've connected with a group of other forum managers and we've had in depth discussions regarding long term viability of the end of life vB3 line, and the future of forums and forum software. The group agrees that XenForo is one of the best ever produced forum packages, on many levels.

For myself, it isn't about "pretty" things, or social network integration, or Likes and Awards, or embedded media in posts... It's about a core principle of the XenForo development team. They wrote the package with a "security first" approach. You can look a long time and not find anything of significance as far as xF exploits.

As for those pretty and whiz bang things, I'll be removing almost all of that. Social media buttons - gone! Likes button - gone! Trophies and awards - gone! Embedded media... well, you get the idea.

One more reason for why: The second thing that really sold me on doing this, and got me in high gear on an implementation plan, was the support for small screen devices. Handhelds (phones, iPods and the like) are almost impossible to use here. You can't navigate and often have to scroll side to side... It's awful.

XenForo has native support for what is called a responsive design. The skin adjusts to the size of the screen extremely well. And posting and such is built in.

Well, I could go on and on, but, enough for starters. As for when this conversion / update will occur:

Perhaps Saturday night. Maybe around 34 hours or so from the timestamp on this post.

 

A screen shot of what it'll look like at launch. I matched the colors and used a version of the current logo.

The colors are... softer, I guess. But, it's still similiar to what we have now.

I'm not going to worry about the skin/style for launch. I just wanted to get it close and get it ready to use. More skin options may follow afterwards.

 

Handheld screen shots...




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Yes, I am demanding when it comes to things related to security and privacy... more so for my forum than even personal computing at home.

Yes, we are at, and will stay at Digital Ocean. I believe them to be quite secure. (A number of those other forum managers have also brought some of their sites to DO.)

I'm in no way concern about the XenForo software itself or its developers. I've known about some of their key people a long time, from before XenForo. I won't be using any complex Add-ons from other people. I've grabbed a few template mods, just to save myself some development effort for simple changes. Also, I've reviewed many others just to see how various Add-on authors approach the XenForo developement framework.

I am a forum software mod developer myself and have been for years. I've worked in vBulletin, IPB and SMF. I've developed mods for others several times. So, I intend to mostly do my own development for key functions I'll want to add here, as I did over these years on the current forum software.

In fact, I finished my first ever xF add-on development two days ago. It's related to SSL integration on the forum. Something most people don't think about when a site allows browsing in both http: and https: - the issue of accidentally clicking on a link a member posted that is in the other method of access from what you are using.

You are browsing using https: Bob makes a post in a thread you are reading pointing at another thread. You decide to click on it, but, you didn't notice Bob's link was http: not https: - problem. Maybe you just exposed your credentials on the network. Or the reverse. You are using http: here, but, you are running through a anon proxy or other service. John posts an IMG link to an upload in another thread, but, he's using https and so his IMG tag is https:. Your proxy config only handles http, and you have no rules in place as to what to do when you hit an https object. When your browser fetches that image, it uses your direct internet connection, revealing your real IP to the site.

Both of those situations are very undesirable. When I added mixed access methods here in vB, I wrote a mod that ensured whatever method you are using, all the member posted content will be served to you that same way, regardless of what they prefixed their links with. This mod was the highest "Must Have" on a list of about 12 must haves, all needed before I said we could go live on a new forum package. I finished it and verified it does exactly what the one here has been doing for a few years now.

Anyway, I think we'll be both secure and maintain the privacy of our environment.

 

It's not about what has happened. It's about what might happen. You do your risk assessment and then you act accordingly.