Upgrade Forums!

[nick2588]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Upgrade the Mac OS X Hints Forums to a newer version of vBulletin, or better yet, to a better forum system like Invision Board (http://www.invisionboard.com/) (yes, you can easily transfer from vBulletin to Invision Board using a free convert tool)!! The currently installed forum system is very old and it has no features. I am very dissattisfied with the current Mac OS X Hints Forums. :(

The major reason for this is that it is VERY hard to find even my own posts! Highlighting threads that you have posted is a VERY basic requirement. Heck, even your stupid read/unread indicator doesn't work. :( :(

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by nick2588
The major reason for this is that it is VERY hard to find even my own posts! Highlighting threads that you have posted is a VERY basic requirement. Heck, even your stupid read/unread indicator doesn't work. :( :(
Hmm.. While there may be good reasons to update the forums, both your reasons seem silly to me.

Want to find your own posts? Click search and type in your username, press enter.

The "stupid" read/unread indicator works fine here, I use it every time I visit.

The only time it seems to have an issue is if I "list unread" in the morning, but don't actually read the messages. When I arrive at work and "list unread", it only shows the unread since I quit my browser at home. Odd, but not a show stopper by any means.

[nick2588]

Why NOT upgrade the forums? Especially now that they are very old, and that you just upgraded the rest of the site. Also, the colours are not very asthetically pleasing.

[mclbruce]

Originally posted by nick2588
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Upgrade the Mac OS X Hints Forums to a newer version of vBulletin

Oh, and could you turn off HTML highlighting as well :-)

[filburt1]

Originally posted by nick2588
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Upgrade the Mac OS X Hints Forums to a newer version of vBulletin, or better yet, to a better forum system like Invision Board (http://www.invisionboard.com/) (yes, you can easily transfer from vBulletin to Invision Board using a free convert tool)!!

It's illogcal to upgrade from software that they've paid for to a free package.

edit: they're also running a version that is only 0.0.1 out of date.

[nick2588]

Originally posted by filburt1
edit: they're also running a version that is only 0.0.1 out of date.
Alright, then add all the missing feature back in. If they weren't removed in the first place, then that 0.0.1 makes a big difference.

By the way, it is illogical to pay for a forum system in the first place! They should have used the FREE package in the first place. And it is not illogical to upgrade. That free Invision Board forum system is better in the first place, and Mac OS X Hints has definately already got its good out of this paid-for forum system. It would only be "illogical" if Mac OS X Hints had just purchased this forum system yesterday, which they didn't.

[Craig R. Arko]

I believe that Sao has volunteered to do some design work on the forums site. I would say that the chance of a major software switch at this time is so close to zero as to be not worth worrying about. We're more concerned with things like the intermittent server problem that takes the site down.

I'm curious to know what issues people are having with the search capabilities, though, since it is the quality and availability of the content and not the 'purtyness' or feature bloat of the site which concern me.

Most all of the stuff which is disabled was intentionally disabled, and will likely remain so, unless a mighty good reason is provided to make a change.

[djn1]

I'd agree that the forums are now less aesthetically pleasing than the main site, but so what? As far as I'm concerned everything works fine and I don't have any problems searching for content. Admittedly, the answers I might want to find aren't always there but I don't think that can be attributed to the software ;)

[Phil St. Romain]

I tried that Invision demo and found it much slower than this software. I also don't see where its features offer many advantages to what we already have.

There are various skins we can try out with this forum. Perhaps we should give it a higher priority.

[AKcrab]

Originally posted by nick2588
Alright, then add all the missing feature back in. If they weren't removed in the first place, then that 0.0.1 makes a big difference.
What missing features are you talking about?

[yubbie2]

Also, the colours are not very asthetically pleasing.

I don't know about all of you, but I could care less what the colors look like... I'm here for the information! Unless it's some dizzying red on blue combination, it looks fine.

Just my $0.02

I also think all site update concerns should be left to the admins... heck, that's why they're admins in the first place. Right now the site is fast, informative, and works. At least give them some breathing time, considering Rob & co. have spent much of the past few months working on the upgrade to the main page.

Ok, make it $0.03 :-)

[griffman]

In no particular order...[list=1] vBulletin was chosen for one primary reason: Speed. I tested most of the free packages alongside vBulletin. None of them compared. Also keep in mind at the time I looked and launched this site, phpBB was not available in its current form, and what was available wasn't worth looking at.

Nearly as important as the user end of the software is the admin end of the software. Even today, vBulletin has the best admin and theme interface of any of the programs I look at. Closing and moving and repointing threads is easy (much easier than on phpBB), and addition and changes to groups, moderators, themes, and announcements is very well done. Sometimes, you get what you pay for ... which leads to ...

We chose to pay for vBulletin because it offered the best combination of features, ease of use, and speed of any of the forum packages I've looked at. That may no longer be true, and I am constantly looking at alternatives. There may be a change in the future, but as Craig noted, there are more pressing things to worry about.

To be technically correct, we are now 0.0.2 revisions out of date. Both of the fixes are minor and cosmetic, not major feature adds. I'll deal with this at some point, but it's certainly not really high on my list.

The focus of macosxhints.com is and (as long as I'm involved in it) will always be on information. That's why we've chosen to disable avatars (user images), images in postings, images in signatures, and all the other various eye candy that adds nothing to the technical content of the boards. There are lots of sites out there that allow these things; if that's what you want, then you will probably be happiest elsewhere. A very related note is that the site features very few "off topic" areas (just the Coat Room, really), so that the only people posting here are interested in either posting problems or posting solutions. As far as community goes, I have very little interest in developing the busiest boards on the web if most of that busy-ness is related to posts on life in general, how much Apple sucks, the next unreleased pirated beta, how great Apple is, or any of the other usual forum fodder. macosxhints is about one thing -- getting the most out of OS X.

I'm still not sure I understand your original comment about highlighting your own threads. You can subscribe to any thread you wish, including your own, and build your own custom forum page, basically. You can get email reminders when notes are posted in threads of your choice. As someone else pointed out, you can find all your threads just by seaching on your author name.

If anyone is unhappy with the theme here, they are more than welcome to take a shot at a replacement. Just contact me via email and I can send you all the graphics files you'll need; you'll have to hand-tweak a page of the site, though, to show how you'd change the CSS definitions, as I cannot distribute the vBulletin package (one of the "cons" on the choice we made to pay for the package).[/list=1]If none of this makes you feel any better about the forums, then you'll probably never be happy reading here. We'll never be flashy, we'll never be chatty, but I hope we'll always be a source of relevant, timely, and useful information, both here and on the main site.

-rob.