I think it's time for an Upgrade

[Fangu]

Lex, what OS/browser are you on? Cus browsing TLS on Opera turned shite with one of the newest versions - I swapped to the built in one and that works fine. It's a bit of zooming, but it's no problem at all. (I don't use the mobile skin, I use the normal web version.)

Also I can't speak for the forum really, I have no insight to what has been custom created and not. So I'd welcome an upgrade of the forum (and forum only, none of that bridge stuff) if:

a) the people who knows it well (Yop, Aaron) says it's fine/ shouldn't be a problem. But I have never done a vB upgrade myself and I have no idea if the database would start misbehaving, etc. tl;dr it's all up to if Yop cba with it (hahaha yes I know), in which case trying it out on fhtagn would be a good idea. He would also have to consider the financial situation. As of now, TLS approximately zeroes out, from what I understand. If vB version x has a licence that costs more, we might have to start up with ads or something.

However, more importantly

b) the new version don't look radically different from the old. BFF's 'activity points' and 'awards' system drives me up the wall and I'd throw up if we installed it There's this thing about users being given something brand new - chances are members will embrace it, but chances are also it won't 'be like it used to' and they might lose interest. That being said, I haven't heard any user yet saying the forum looks and feels outdated. I think 'just because' and 'new is better' are poor arguments for changing something.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Fwiw I browse on mobile all the time without any major problems. In fact I'm posting this from my phone. However I use the main skin, which may be a pain in the arse for a lot of people.

 

[Telcontar]

The forum looks and feels outdated.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I'm mostly with Aaron and Fangu simply because they know coding better than most any of us and because I don't see any obvious ways in which the forum looks/feels outdated. Obviously, the day will come that an upgrade is actually required, but I'm just not seeing what in the here and now demands it as a matter of practicality.

That being said, if uograding is the direction the wind blows, I have no particularly vested opposition to it either.

As for browsing on mobile, I do most of my browsing on TLS by phone. It's generally fine, even for multi-paragraph posts, unless I'm in a bad signal area and all the phone's efforts are going to searching for signal (or it's lagging for some other reason, such as needing to power cycle).

 

[Carlie]

As I basically don't understand any of this my only productive contribution is to drag Masa in here so he can explain exactly what he does on BFF.

 

[Cthulhu]

I find the current vB version's styles to be shit already - why did they even make an editor for that? Just lrn2css, it's a billion times easier and they could reduce the license price by half,

I'm not a fan of vB, but as others have pointed out, it probably still is the best out there. And I've really been wondering why, with the current revival of the open source community and influx of excellent software developers, the forum software thing hasn't been re-invented yet.

There's http://www.discourse.org/, which was made by the dude behind StackOverflow, but I'm pretty sure the style's just too different from what people are used to.

Upgrading to the latest version of vB should be doable. The styles are worrying, but also kinda depend on how much they've changed the base HTML and such of the vB we're using right now.

But yeah, I did mention in the other thread that we should probably update vB sometime; FFOF was h4x0r3d a while ago, possibly due to an exploit in the vB version used on there. The main defense we have against that is the login protections and not displaying the version of vB we're using, .

Also, I have $250 in the TLS paypal account at the moment, so I don't really need that much more for a new license.

Also, what exactly is the 'mobile suite', and why is it worth $150? I mean it shouldn't be that difficult to install a mobile skin and be done with it.

edit: oic, native mobile apps, . vB 5 seems to ship with a responsive design itself though, so, not sure if we'd need the mobile suite - unless people really really really want to access it natively.

 

[Flintlock]

Also, I have $250 in the TLS paypal account at the moment, so I don't really need that much more for a new license.

My mind turned to that as soon as I read Lex's opening post, because I remember you mentioning it before. I'm always happy to chip in a few euros when TLS needs the money, but I guess it's not really needed so much now. And it seems like there's still a debate to be had about whether we should upgrade at all. I don't have much to add to the debate - I'm more familiar with phpBB and Invision forums myself - but I'll follow this thread and await the decision.

 

[Claymore]

Being new, my opinion probably won't matter much, but from my fresh perspective here's some quick thoughts. The main site definitely looks and feels outdated I'm afraid. I can easily see how it could turn new users off from even looking at the content, let alone joining the discussions here and contributing. I can definitely say without a doubt that if I had landed on the main site rather than the forums first, I wouldn't have gone any further. That would have been the end of the road for me. But since I came to the forum first, I was drawn in. So, for me personally, the main site needs more of a major update to look more up to date and flashy rather than the forum.

I don't know much about the software, but it does come with a CMS system to create some great looking articles and such, but yeah, you'd most likely have a heck of a lot of work to try and get something like the forum's current look. And though I don't think I've seen a specific thanks hack, there are similar stuff like karma points, and nifty things like posting level bars and such to make things stand out.

But yeah, ultimately, the main site needs more of an upgrade than the forum. If going to the latest vb does that, then I'm all for it, and it would definitely draw in more users. But the major downside is the loss of the forum's current look.

Just my two cents (or pennies, British pride!)

 

[Ⓐaron]

I created a thread about vB5 on another forum and the main thing people said is that it's really bloated. No one thought it was an improvement. Of course, only a few people even responded. I do know that when Eyes on Final Fantasy, which has a similar level of traffic to our site, upgraded to vBulletin 4 they started having a much larger number of server issues than they'd previously had. Honestly, that, even more so than the style manager, is one major thing keeping me from wanting to upgrade.

There's actually something like karma points in the current version of vBulletin (namely, the reputation system); we just don't have it enabled. We have the thanks hack instead. We could probably enact posting level bars with the current version of vBulletin pretty easily too but I don't know whether people think those would be an improvement. We already have user ranks like "Epic Member" and the like, which are pretty close to the same thing (although people may not be able to figure out what rank applies to what range of post counts).

 

[Lex]

^oh dear

vB (vBulletin) is forum software, and has nothing to do with the front-end site.

Incidentally, the front-end site underwent a complete redesign last year, and it's in line now with current browsing standards/ other news sites (superior in a lot of ways actually).

What about it do you think is outdated? Do you maybe have an example of a site you think looks good?

 

[Ⓐaron]

The other thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is that we probably can't really be sure that upgrading won't cause any problems until we actually upgrade, for the simple reason that there's no easy way to test server load on a test site. We can certainly test to see if the hacks will work, if we can create a similar appearance to the vB5, and so on, but whatever test site we create won't actually have the same level of traffic as TLS proper (unless we artificially create a bunch of server load somehow, I guess).

 

[Lex]

I moved the last few posts to the "Our Site" thread.

 

[Cthulhu]

vBulletin just introduced a hosting platform (originally named 'vBulletin Cloud'); for $15 a month you get a hosted vB environment; stays up to date, retain ownership of the database (I'm assuming an on-demand export?), etc. IDK if the 'bronze' plan would work for us though, I think we're bigger than 25 GB / month for the forums, . $30 a month is about as much as we pay for server hosting too, and tallies up to $360 a year, so.

 

[Flintlock]

Would we still need to pay for our main site to be hosted separately, though?

 

[Ⓐaron]

As far as I'm concerned, if there are no major problems with our current hosting, there's really no reason to switch and risk screwing things up. Unless it's way cheaper or something, but I don't think it would be.

 

[Cthulhu]

Would we still need to pay for our main site to be hosted separately, though?

Yase, and TBH I quite prefer it that way. Also Aaron, yeah, it's probably not going to be cheaper. Probably a good solution if one is a complete nub when it comes to hosting, can't be bothered, or has plenty of money (like companies) for it.