forum software

[morgin]

You guys been looking into vBulletin 4 or any of the other big board packages? I'd imagine this place would be a monumental task to update but forum software has improved a fair bit in the last few years and 3.8.4 is getting dated!

[photon]

Yeah it's coming, I had it almost ready to go too with a new theme made up and then they announced a big change to their theme system, so basically I decided to wait.

Finally they launched a new version yesterday with those changes, so now I have to create a new forum theme again for it.

That's basically the biggest obstacle, the rest of the update is actually not that bad (since we run pretty clean software with only a few mods).

It's a few days work minimum to do, which is hard to do in the evenings when everyone else is talking about all the fun they have in SWTOR

[REDVAN]

Is this software upgrade free?

Not that it's any of my business, but I Hope Bingo (et al? Or just Bingo?) is getting the site paid for with ad revenues...

Otherwise, if required, I suggest a donation drive. In fact, to help out, I'd send signed photos of myself to any poster who donated 20 bucks or more!

On Topic: will a software upgrade affect any readers? What I mean is that I use tapatalk on my tablet and phone quite often, and hope the upgrade doesn't affect that!

[photon]

Software isn't free, but we purchased the upgrade quite a while back. I don't know the specifics of the site's finances though, but if there was a situation where we needed I'm sure we'd ask the community.

It shouldn't affect any readers, vb4 has been out quite a while now and I'm pretty sure tapatalk works with both versions. VB has their own mobile app as well, though I don't know many details about it yet.

[photon]

So I did a quick test of an upgrade, and it seemed to run ok actually.

They have a theme builder now which at least gets me half the way there, doesn't look horrible and I haven't manually adjusted anything yet so maybe it'll take less time to theme than I was fearing.

The upgrade takes quite a while though, a good half day at least, and reindexing the stuff for search will probably take at least a week if not more (though that can be done while things are running). Will need to schedule it to run when there's a few days between games.

[ken0042]

All Star Break week? There is a full 6 days in between games.

[Jbo]

Just my vote but I would say no need to update until the dog days of summer

Selfishly I just don't want the site down for a week during hockey season

[photon]

Oh it'll probably only be down for half a day to a day, the rest of the process can take place while the forum is up, it'll just mean that search results will be incomplete until the reindexing finishes.

Yeah All Star break might be good, though that's getting close to trade deadline.

I guess we'll see a) if I'm ready by then and b) how confident I am.

I'd say we could also setup a temporary forum, but that hasn't gone so well in the past.

[MrMastodonFarm]

Originally Posted by photon

Oh it'll probably only be down for half a day to a day, the rest of the process can take place while the forum is up, it'll just mean that search results will be incomplete until the reindexing finishes.

Yeah All Star break might be good, though that's getting close to trade deadline..

There is a trade freeze over All-Star break, no?

If it's only down for a day (A DAY?!?) then around that time would be perfect. Nothing happens the day after the all-star game.

[morgin]

Any updates to this?

[Azure]

Holy crap, I would die if CP were down for a day.