Forum restored back to 4.x

[Handruin]

Sorry folks about the chaos that has occurred over the past 11+ days. Vbulletin 5.1 caused a lot of problems that were very disruptive in many ways. I realize there were posts made during this time but I made the call to restore to the pre-upgrade(downgrade) of vb 5.1. I'm very sorry for this and it wasn't a call I made lightly. I'd rather the site continue with a few posts lost than to suffer through what the site had become.

The posts aren't entirely lost. As an intermediate compromise, I've left the vb 5.1 instance alive with the posts that were made since the upgrade. You can browse that instance of the forum here. I've set permissions for Regular Users to not be allowed to post new threads or replies to alleviate having new content written there. I will leave this version up for a few days so if you made a good post and want to try recreating it (via copy & paste) into this version, please feel free. I wasn't going to try and merge any posts from that version to this version to avoid further corruption. Again, sorry for the problems that this all caused.

 

[timwhit]

I'm glad to be back on version 4.x. So much better. Thanks for all the work you do for us, Doug.

 

[Bozo]

Thanks! 4.X is much better.

 

[ddrueding]

Thanks Doug, that version was clearly sub-optimal. More than anything it had me wondering what the vBulletin people were thinking.

 

[Chewy509]

Thanks Doug, that version was clearly sub-optimal. More than anything it had me wondering what the vBulletin people were thinking.

Agreed.

But you could replace the vendor in the last sentence with:
More than anything it had me wondering what the Microsoft people were thinking
More than anything it had me wondering what the Oracle people were thinking
More than anything it had me wondering what the Ubuntu people were thinking
More than anything it had me wondering what the GNOME people were thinking
More than anything it had me wondering what the HP people were thinking

Seems to be happening a lot these days...

 

[Mercutio]

This is so much better it's not even funny. Thank you Doug.

 

[P5-133XL]

Sorry it didn't work out well and you ended up wasting a bunch of your time. The normal assumption is that a version upgrade is an improvement but unfortunately sometimes it does not work out that way.

 

[Howell]

Thanks for the effort and time Doug.

 

[timwhit]

Hey Doug, the 5.1 installation is showing the message: "Working on problems. Be back shortly. -Handruin"

 

[snowhiker]

Let me add to the chorus of THANK YOUs for returning the forum to the previous versions and another THANK YOU for the hard work and time involved in setting up, maintaining and paying for this forum.

and also...................WTF vBulletin??????

 

[Stereodude]

This is definitely much better.

 

[time]

I'm mostly concerned that Doug has had to commit vast amounts of time and energy. He didn't sign up to support clueless software, yet he's been giving his all trying to make it work anyway while we throw rocks.

Hat's off, Doug. You're a truly generous soul and we need more like you.

 

[sedrosken]

I also would like to add to the chorus of Thank yous. I didn't notice a lot of the problems but the new UI was throwing me for every loop possible. I'm not going to bother reposting my posts from that version, I got my point across then I guess.

 

[Handruin]

Thanks for the feedback and mostly thanks for being understanding/tolerant about the events that happened. I wasn't expecting the new software to be as challenging as it was. In the past we've been able to deal with the changes but this one was ridiculous. I felt that if I had left the site as-is or worked through trying to solve as many of the items that piled up, people would have just been done visiting and that's worse than just taking the hit and losing a few posts to revert back. I need to figure out what to do next as there was a very nice intention and donation to help keep us up to date with forum software from David. I don't want to just toss aside the donation so I'll need to see if there is some recourse from vbulletin to help with this.

 

[ddrueding]

Don't feel any pressure from me; the intention was to make things better. This is certainly better than that. However it goes is fine with me.