Yu-Gi-Oh! ETC Store
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ANYWAY.
We (the staff and a good chunk of former staff) have been looking at where our forum software, IPB, is headed. The company that produces it released a public demo of IPB 3.0, and sufficed to say, all of us are just like... "what the frak, it's hideous." And it is. Hideous. Really.
On the one hand, the aesthetics of it could be ignored if there were some good features to go along with it, but none of us were that impressed with that either. A couple of their "bigger" new features are things that've been found in vBulletin for literally years. On top of not delivering on those fronts, things have gotten even worse in some areas. The user control panel is a huge mess now and it's insanely difficult to navigate, thread view is messy and difficult as well. Overall IPB 3.0, even though it's still in alpha, shows where the software is going, and we don't like it.
As (most) of you will know, we tried vBulletin earlier this year and ended up switching back to IPB because like, 51% wanted to. It was a tiny margin of people, and a good bit of those who supported IPB last time now support vBulletin.
It's going to take us some time to get things sorted out, but the process will basically be like this:
- We're going to work on actually getting a license. We'll be talking to Howie about this, and possibly pulling funds together ourselves if needed. A lot of people have said they're willing to contribute, so it won't be a problem.
- We're going to post information this time about vBulletin its self. We're going to make guides explaining the differences between IPB and vB, where things can be found and how you can do them, and so on. (If you're familiar with both IPB and vB forums and want to help out, send me a PM.)
- We're going to start converting some of our skins on IPB to vB, to help ETC feel (for the most part) the same. Again, if you're familiar with web development, CSS in particular, and are also familiar with skinning in the vBulletin admin panel, send me a PM and we'll be glad to have help.
- We'll shut the board offline on a weekend night, probably Friday or Saturday, at a time when a lot of staff will be able to be online to work on the conversion and get everything set up. The reason it needs to be at night is because the migration script takes a lot of server resources, and we want as few members as possible to be online so that we have more to put towards the actual migration.
- Once the board comes back online, we'll try to set it up so that the next day a lot of staffers will be online to help everyone with problems they have. Answer questions about how to do things, where things are, help with problems, and so on.
- The first time you log in after we've converted to vBulletin, your current password will not work. It's not a bug, it doesn't mean you have to reregister and go asking for someone to reset it for you. You can reset it yourself, and you'll have to if you want to log back in. There'll be instructions for this once we get closer to the actual conversion date.
- Once we convert, there's no going back this time. We're sticking with it. Period. ETC will still be ETC, all of the members and forums and everything you're used to that make ETC what it is will still be there. If you want to leave over this, fine, but it's pretty damn fickle. Things will look and work a bit differently, but for the most part it's all still just ETC in new clothes.
- This should help with the board errors we've been getting lately. vBulletin is less resource intense than IPB is on many of the fronts we'll be using it on.
- No data should be lost when we convert. At most, the only things we might lose are avatars/profile pictures, and profile comments. The important stuff, though, like accounts; personal messages; threads; posts, and so on will still be there.
- The conversion should take a couple of hours, maximum. We pruned a lot of accounts, so that part of the migration won't take as long as last time, but we have nearly double the number of posts (which take the most time.) I'll be staying up the night we do it until it's done though, so the next morning at the lastest ETC should be up and running and going smooth.
