I'm responsible. Blame me.
No, really the blame goes to vbulletin. We were on the vbulletin platform for ten years, but hadn't upgraded for about the last five. We were running on version 3 while the latest was version 5. Anybody who knows computers and Internet knows that the older versions of anything online are subject to malicious hacking and corruption. Not to mention that the speed and usability (theoretically) improves with the later versions. So we upgraded to ver 5 in February. What we didn't know was that in the years since ver 3 was created, vbulletin was sold to a big company that basically doesn't give a s**t and was just cashing in on vbulletin's former reputation as the best forum platform. We had no end to problems, and we seemed to just go in circles with the vbulletin support team to get anything fixed. I finally did some digging and discovered that other people all over the Internet were complaining about the new vbulletin and its buggy code. It got so bad Carol and I actually had a phone call with Deborah in July where the option to shut it down forever was on the table. But only for a moment. We decided that would be a huge loss to everybody who's contributed anything to the ReincarnationForum in the last 19 years, and to the Internet community at large. So we decided to gird up and look for a new platform to replace vbulletin.
I did research and came up with XenForo as the best choice, and a leading favorite of the forum geeks on the Internet. Curiously, it was developed by the original developers of vbulletin who left vbulletin when the company was sold. So it has the same philosophy and feel as the original vbulletin.
I also needed to find a new host, since vbulletin 5 was hosted on their cloud. Our new host is physically located in the UK, and is small enough we get really good service.
The delay from July to late August when we finally went live was due mostly to problems getting complete and uncorrupted database files from vbulletin. They were a headache to the end! We went through installations where 20% of the post were missing, where all the member info was missing, all the videos were missing. Our intrepid installer (a free lancer names Claudio from Todo10, and an expert in migrating forums from vbulletin to XenForo) kept at it until is was 98% right. Even he was pulling his hair out at the crap that vbulletin was serving up.
So if we're missing a few posts (Claudio says that's normal with such an old forum and due to some threads missing links or getting corrupted), and missing passwords (vbulletin said they can't transfer passwords, which makes sense from a security standpoint), it's a small price to pay compared to what we were facing in July. Only in the last few days have we gotten our core senior moderators and admins on board (some are still aren't back yet--everybody's having problems). We're still solving basic problems, like how to set permissions for the different sections. And the password email problem is on my agenda for today.
Right now it feels the days after a tornado whipped through town (you know those photos we see in the news), and we're cleaning up the mess and starting to rebuild.
We'll do a general announcement when we have all the critical kinks worked out. In the meantime, any member who's discovered we're live and is back posting, you're our vanguard and our heroes for sticking with it. Thank you for your patience and persistence.
And if any of you are interested in helping out, as a moderator, perhaps, let the mods know. We intend to build up our membership to the levels we were at before, and beyond, and we'll need help. XenForo is a superior platform, with modern features, and already we can tell, as we struggle to learn the ropes, that it's easier to use and manage. We may be rebuilding and rehabilitating now, but the new ReincarnationForum.com will be bigger and better than ever. Eventually.
Steve
