Time for a change?

[fury]

Hi folks. I've been feeling a bit itchy lately and in the mood to tweak stuff (computers, programs, and sure, how about a website or two?). I have also become increasingly annoyed with Jelsoft's (and now vBulletin Solutions') stonewalling regarding the 4 vBulletin licenses I apparently do not own according to them.

I found a new forum software package that I'd like to start testing out. It's called XenForo and is by the same few guys that were responsible for the good things about vBulletin back in its day. You can see a stock forum setup at their site here: http://xenforo.com/community/

It's a new take on the same old forum stuff, so a lot of it will seem familiar, been-there-done-that, but I like what they've done with it. They basically started from scratch and built something that feels very fast, streamlined, and extensible.

If all goes well, I would be converting XiBase to it, perhaps giving the site a fresh start. Wanted to give fair warning about the fact that I'm gonna be messing around with stuff and things might look different in the near future if things do go well. If there's anything you feel too nostalgic about and want to make sure doesn't change, feel free to let me know, otherwise it's all open for changing -- e.g. forum structure, smilies, logo. Mods can take their pick if they want, of course. This is all in my head right now, I can't get started on this right away (complications involving PHP recompiling and flux capacitor discombobulatamajigging), so plenty of time to pitch in your ideas, thoughts, and farts in my general direction.

 

[Gonzo]

Have at it.

What's with Jelsoft? What do they mean you don't own the software?

 

[fury]

Back when Sam handed everything off to me, he asked that Jelsoft transfer the licenses to be in my name. They neglected to tell him that they refused to do so. When I spoke with them about it, it was still under his name, and they will not speak to anybody about transferring the licenses except him through his old (dead) email account. I wished them luck getting a hold of him at an email address that isn't active anymore, and they regarded me as some hacker trying to steal his licenses, so they deactivated the member account entirely and I haven't heard from them since. I sent in support requests and got the same canned reply "if you really are the person to whom these licenses are entitled, you will know the middle name of the owner's father, the credit card number used to purchase them, and the numbers to next week's winning lottery tickets. Until then, go pound sand and have a nice day"

All I was going to do was grab the latest version of vBulletin for each of the sites to make sure they weren't going to get hacked, and instead I basically learned just how much Jelsoft cared about their customers. And then as if they couldn't get any worse, they got bought by a company that has no clue what users/customers really want, and ran off their best developers/designers. I've never seen a sharp fall like that since Rome went down.

 

[Huge]

Nice way to piss off your customers...

 

[fury]

Come see the playground, flurffmeister.dyndns.org

There's a style chooser on the lower left corner where it says Default Style

 

[fury]

I finally got the root access back to the server here, and have installed a copy. It's not final, I'm still playing around with the styles, forum organization, etc. and whatever's posted there will probably be deleted when I move everything from here. But you can see some of what I had in mind at last

http://xibase.com/xf/

Lemme know what you like, what you don't, what you'd like to see, (am I missing a forum or two? probably, although a couple of them might stand to be merged in with something else)