Old news: Forum upgrade imminent

[Robin Garr]

A lot of you still haven't been over to the <b>testing area for the forum software upgrade</b>. Please take a moment to do it today, as we'll soon commit to making this change, and we'd like as many of you as possible to take it for a quick test-drive before we throw the switch.

Repeating yesterday's announcement:

As most of you are aware, since we put the ill-fated Netscape experience behind us, we've been running this forum on the excellent open-source forum software, PhpBB. I think just about everyone has been happy with it.

Now, to hail the New Year, we're planning to migrate the forum to the newly updated Version 3 of PhpBB. Don't worry, this is not another Netscape debacle. Version 3 is simply an evolutionary development of our Version 2. It looks similar and works in a similar way - it should not require extensive re-learning. It does contain a few new bells and whistles which we hope you'll enjoy ... you're certainly not required to use them, but you may enjoy discovering them. The more important changes, though, are under the hood and won't be immediately obvious to you, but they will help the forum to run faster, better and more securely (not a trivial matter if you noticed what happened to Wine Therapy last week).

Anyway, I'm posting here, in WLDG and Friends & Fun to urge you all to pop over and give the new setup a try. Please notice that it's in beta testing, so don't post anything important over there just yet; it may not be retained when we move the forum in full. Do check it out, though, and I'll be there to answer any questions you may have about the changes and differences.

<b>New Forum here</b>
(You'll need to log in again, using your regular forum user name and password.)

Robin, the upgrade looks terrific. How soon is "imminent?" I look forward to the switch.

I like it too. Better than the current one, I'd say.
Ines

Robin, What's the official start date? Or will we just find ourselves in the land of New when we sign on one day in the near future?

b

[Robin Garr]

Robin, What's the official start date? Or will we just find ourselves in the land of New when we sign on one day in the near future?

Barb, we're about ready. Given that everyone seems to like the new revision and it's more robust, there's not much reason to delay.

Probably the biggest issue right now is behind the scenes: Because the committee-written forum registration page is suckily written and conveys an attitude and tone that doesn't fit us well, I'm not willing to go public until I've written new copy. But there's a technical issue: Those pages are hard to reach, and they're written in a quirky character set that's hard to tweak without breaking something. I'm kind of scared to fool with it, and we can't move until I get over that.

So, bottom line, I expect that a lot of people will just sign in one day and find the new look. But we'll try to give at least a little notice, especially since the forums will have to be closed for a few hours (during the wee hours of the night in the US, we hope) while the change occurs.

Looks good, Robin. Interestingly, the "number of posts" counter is out, but I'm guessing that's because the new forum is just in "test" mode at the moment ?

I like the look of the new forum.