it was so much cooler and simple to use :(

:( :( :(

Vanilla rocks for usability.

live in the now dude

VB will have it ship shape and easy to use in no time. :) :) :) :)

Know what you mean

Plus had to re-invent myself too

Ugh... sorry, this is awful.

The show new threads link makes it jsut like the old one.

Give me a week or so.

Vanilla was a usability dream, but it was also bug-ridden and I needed over 30 extensions to make it as good as it was (did you compare our Vanilla over others? Ours rocked).

vBulletin solves a hell of a lot of bugs, it's faster and can scale better.

Vanilla was simple and easy, but it also was causing problems with how things were running.

Just give me a couple of weeks to bed this one in. I'm still making tons of changes as I go along and you'll see stuff changing all the time.

Could be worse.... you could be stabbed.

i trust you vb.
i trust you.

Once you get used to using this it is far mor advanced than the old one.
Just takes a bit of getting used to

new stuff sucks thats why i have a telephone with a bell in at home no mobile phone no flat screen tv no laptop no internet connection can't we just stay in the 1980's when bikes were bikes and men were men and the computer was a big whirring thing filling a room with tape reels and flashing lights and three people to control it ah the good old days
BRING BACK THE OLD FORUM ? or could we have a parrallel old style forum running along side the new forum !

but we do have private messages now. better than whispers.

Me too i feel lost....

I'm getting use to it

Yeah. Lets stop giving VB a hard time.

I treat forums like Xmas parties, I would never organise one myself, so I don't turn up and complain about other people who have done all the work.

Give it a couple of weeks, and I'm sure the forum will be rocking harder than The Stooges circa Raw Power.

Yeah, I'm pretty impressed with how its looking already, using the "View new posts" button actually is pretty similar, nothing like the sprawling mess it could be.

Props to VB.

it could do with some mod_rewrite goodness to make all the old links/bookmarks work...

theres too many buttons.
but i have faith, in time...

That's coming.

I've stored all of the old discussion ID's and I am going to write a script (probably tomorrow) that maps old links to new ones.

I don't mind it, getting used to it already... Nice one VB... :)

I know it's going to be better in the long run, but right now I don't like it either...

change is scary, but if it saves VB time and effort it's got to be a winner.

I liked how you could see all posts in all categories on one screen in the old one. Can you do that in the new one?

+1

Click on the new posts button at the top of the screen when you are at the home page.

It needs to feel and look and have the usability of Vanilla. This is horrible! Did the bugs in Vanilla really bother the majority of forum users?

It's either "New Posts" in the centre of the navbar at the top of the page, or if you want to view even the unread stuff just click "Quick Links > Today's Posts".

I've yet to finish the navigation. I wanted to migrate the software and bed it in, make sure it was stable and then working on tweaking it.

It took 6 months to tweak Vanilla into shape, I'm giving myself a month to tweak vBulletin into shape.

Yes!

Exactly. Before this forum came about I thought about starting one. I looked into the software one w/e and realised while it was not rocket science and it is quite well documented there is still alot of work to be done to keep it running smoothly and tweak it to how you want and make it inviting e.t.c. It was beyond my technical capabilities at the time (and still is). I am sure it is alot less work for VB than it would be for me as he is super clever and super experience at this but it still takes a alot amount of effort that while it may be a hobby for him is still time consuming.

Like many things it is not the initial set of of something that is tough it is the maintenance and keeping it running. Updates, bug fixes, hacking. Vanilla was good but like VB said there where lots of extensions he had set up. If you see a basic Vanilla site it is a VERY basic forum. Every time VB had to update Vanilla I am sure he had to re do many of the extensions he added, re-hack stuff, because updates NEVER go smoothly.

If V bulletin updates easier and requires less tweaking, bug fixes, extensions, general management and all the stuff we don't see but is especial to the running of the forum then I say it is a good thing.

Give your self time and VB time to tweak the forum and use the New posts link above and V bulletin will function much like the old forum.

Now lets stop being so British and hating change just for the sake of hating change. Give it a chance.

Well done VB. I'll buy you arum and coke.

I'm all for it if it really helps - Maybe it should have been rolled out as a complete package, constructed offline. From working in Web application design there is always a tendency to rush out all of the tech stuff before design and usability and GUI is fully considered in relation to functionality.

Making something easier to manage technically is just as important as making something look a feel and work through design for its users!

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).

We'll get used to it, but still I miss the old one. Good work though VB