Okay, so you can obviously see we are back to the old SMF forum.  We had NUMEROUS complaints and problems (password issues, Admin control board issues, etc) that we just decided to go back to this old forum.  That means that all the posts that were in the past vbulletin nightmare are gone.  No Osama is Dead threads and all your latest updates need to be updated again.  It's as if this May didn't exist.  But the vbulletin was a good experiment to see where we are headed.

 

So, that leaves us with needing help with the forum's future.  Do we:

 

A). Stick with this old one that we all know and love (or hate).

B). You actually LIKED the new 4.0 version of vbulletin and wouldn't mind going back to that.

 

or...

 

C). Click www.skyscrapercity.com and tell us what you think.  Do you like THIS forum?  Would you mind if UrbanOhio looked quite similar? 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

To see where I'm coming from, I prefer C). since it's a little more user-friendly than the 4.0 version but I'm okay with this old one.

 

We TRULY need EVERYONE'S input on this to see what everyone likes.

 

Thanks.

I liked the new forum once I got used to it. The problem, for me anyway, was that www.urbanohio.com didn't appear updated or changed at all. In fact, from Friday night onwards the 'Recent Forum Topics' had not changed and the links were dead. I thought the site was still under construction until Wednesday night. It wasn't until I got into the forum that I was realized it was back up and running.

I just posted a long message in the Horsehoe Casino thread. Is there anyway I can get that text back and repost it??

I was starting to get used to it, but the vbulletin had too many kinks.  It ain't broke so don't fix it, I guess.  Plus, my old avatar is back and all of this is well... just like.... my opinion, man.

Too bad we lost those aerial photo threads from Clevelumbus.  Probably took quite a bit of time to put those together.

If anyone would like their posts from the vbulletin forum (the important ones!) Send me a pm with the thread and time posted and I will reply with the thread content.  All I ask is that you be slightly patient.

Nah, he posted them on SSP ;).  He'll probably bring them back.

My only major complaint about vbulletin was that I couldn't find an easy way to see new posts.  I use the following links (which appear under my login name) ALL THE TIME:

 

Show unread posts since last visit.

Show new replies to your posts.

 

 

Without these, I felt like it was much more difficult to find out when people were posting in the threads I watch.  Maybe vbulletin has an equivalent, but I couldn't find it.

You're playing with my emotions ColDayMan!  First, I didn't want to switch.  You told me vBulletin was great.  Then we switched and I hated it.  Then I got used to it.  Then I actually started liking it.  Then I decided, "wow, this is actually really nice, that darn ColDayMan was right!"  Now we're right back where we started except that I now agree with you that vBulletin 4.0 is actually pretty cool, so I voted for it.

LOL!  I'm the bread to your JAM!

There's something very disturbing about that comment.

What, you don't like WHITE bread?  RACIST!

My only major complaint about vbulletin was that I couldn't find an easy way to see new posts.  I use the following links (which appear under my login name) ALL THE TIME:

 

Show unread posts since last visit.

Show new replies to your posts.

 

 

Without these, I felt like it was much more difficult to find out when people were posting in the threads I watch.  Maybe vbulletin has an equivalent, but I couldn't find it.

 

I had this problem at first.  It seemed as if the New Posts link wasn't working right at first.  But then it was, and it worked the same as "Show unread posts since last visit." with the added advantage of having the double down arrow to go right to the first unread post.  The Settings link at the top of the page would take you to your Subscribed threads, which (since vBulletin subscribes you to threads you post in automatically) is pretty much the equivalent of "Show new replies to your posts."  After I figured this out, I liked vBulletin 4.0 100x more.

I vote the fourth option: I really don't care!

ColDayMan,

 

Can you (or anyone else who may have some info) give maybe a quick pro/con of the vBulletin 4.0 based forum?  I never got a chance to really play around with it so really find it hard to form an opinion.

 

Although I do like that my numbers are back on this account :)

At first, like many people, I really couldn't stand the new version. Then as I got used to it, and you guys fixed it up more, I came to find myself really liking it and the features it had. I feel like the switch was never fully completed and for that reason I chose this version. Cause it works the best at this time. If the new version could be up and running completely id probably choose it instead, but it never fully got to that point.

 

Also pleeeeeease dont go to vbulletin 3.0! I have always hated that for some reason.

So does Tapatalk only work with vBulletin 4.0?  I just plopped down $2.99 for it and only used it once before it stopped working when the forum technology reverted back.

I only had about a half of a day of using vbulletin since I was gone for the switch, so I have no input, other than my vbulletin-induced headache is now gone!

I voted for the old (current as I write this set up) but I figured I would eventually figure out the new system and be happy with it

I prefer this one. vBulletin did grow on me, but I would be very happy to stay here. SMF offers a much better search function.

 

Thanks Rich and Chris for all your trouble/frustrations.

So does Tapatalk only work with vBulletin 4.0?  I just plopped down $2.99 for it and only used it once before it stopped working when the forum technology reverted back.

 

It works with the old as well, but Rich has to change the configuration so it points at the right location.  The same thing happened when we switched to the new...it didn't work for a couple days.

I like both. I voted for this one, but I was starting to like the new one. I like this one better though. Please don't go with the SSP one. Not a fan of that at all. I am on two other forums that use that version and I can't stand it.

Anything but option 3. I am tempted to vote for SMF becauce I can't handle another outage....

 

This kinds of feels like the exact opposite of what waking up from a coma must feel like. I know that a week just happened, but it's gone now. Weird.

It's hard for me to vote. I was comfortable with SMF, but as I learned my way around vbulletin 4.0 I was liking it. The feature I like most on SSP is the ability to apply a border around images by using "" where "n" specifies the border width. I brought that up in Forum Issues before, regarding SMF, and it seems it doesn't exist.

 

Sometimes I gripe about change, but overall I'm pretty adaptable. I'll support whatever choice is made, and thanks to Rich for the tremendous amount of work he has put into the experiment.  :clap:

Yes, mobile version working again!!!!! Whatever changes you guys end up making, please don't lose the mobile URL or at least offer a different URL.

This kinds of feels like the exact opposite of what waking up from a coma must feel like. I know that a week just happened, but it's gone now. Weird.

 

I'd murder someone if my wedding on Saturday didn't happen.  MURDER.  I'm just now un-exhausted.  I don't have time to devote to that all over again, lol.

This kinds of feels like the exact opposite of what waking up from a coma must feel like. I know that a week just happened, but it's gone now. Weird.

 

I'd murder someone if my wedding on Saturday didn't happen.  MURDER.  I'm just now un-exhausted.  I don't have time to devote to that all over again, lol.

 

Hmmm I have been married almost 8 years, I am not exactly sure how I would feel if somebody told me my wedding just didn't happen. I'd have to think about it...

 

I jest Mrs. CBC!

 

Congrats Doc, BTW.

 

What are the weaknesses of SMF btw?

Im still using the old version of the SMF cause I couldn't stand the new look. If I didn't have the option to continue to use this style, I would definitely prefer vbulletin 4.0

Actually now that I think about it, I would like to change my vote to the new one. There were some pretty nice features on there, and over time, the kinks would have been worked out. I think it brought some new life to the forum and was more visually attractive. I was never a fan of the "Curve" version of SMF. So I think, that it is finally time for change and vbulletin 4.0 is a good route to take!

I voted "keep SMF".

 

I have a unique perspective on this matter. I own a message forum and last year I migrated it away from a commercially hosted service that owns all the data called Yuku. Yuku had transformed from a normal BBS service into an idiotic MySpace clone and a lot of features were unavailable or broken (IE, search was next to useless and never found anything.)

 

So last year I finally stumbled into a bunch of scripts (written in Python) that exported the Yuku message base to a MySql database dump file that could be imported to SMF.

 

It was a freaking NIGHTMARE. Getting everything right resulted in MASSIVE amounts of twiddling and experimentation. Even little things in the existing message base like quoting or emoticons were a major PITA to get right. Plus, only the user names came over and user profiles were essentially wiped out.

 

And, people would not read the "how to recover your own account name" instructions I posted. Every person coming over was a special case. (The forum is for IT people and it impressed me how clueless even IT people are about not following instructions.)

 

So I completely respect the amount of work that goes into a conversion like this.  I have done it myself and I don't look forward to work like that.

 

But what I am thinking is that a move like this breaks the formatting of many older messages, and it may be very difficult to get the many formatting combinations completely right.

 

I voted "keep SMF" because I don't really have a clue what vBulletin is supposed to add, so the change seems somewhat pointless. SMF is very rich, and has many add-on modules, some of which I have adopted for my own board.

 

Is vBulletin supposed to address some critical security vulnerabilities of SMF or is it much more efficient to run on a server (can be hosted more cheaply)? I guess those things could play a role in this decision.

 

To me as a user it broke too many things, and doesn't seem to add any value.

One other thing. Several people have noted how much tighter and better looking the screen layout of vBulletin is.

 

I completely agree with that. SMF wastes a lot of white space.

 

What about looking for an improved theme, or finding a freelancer to customize an existing theme to tighten it up? There are always tons of freelancers hanging around the Simple Machines forums. It would probably cost a couple hundred bucks to make it prettier and tighter.

 

That's the whole point of board themes, you can change the layout and appearance without dealing with moving board data around.

 

Just a thought...

I voted stay w/ SMF, only because it works. vbulletin was growing on me, slowly, but I didn't get to play with it enough to truly figure out all of the features, and just be comfortable with the newness of it.

 

Honestly, I'm in the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' category. SMF seems pretty clean in its layout, easy to navigate, and most importantly, I can see the difference between read and unread posts! ;-)

I like SMF.

 

The new forum...well....my eyes just never adjusted to it. Looked very bland to me.

Too bad we lost those aerial photo threads from Clevelumbus.  Probably took quite a bit of time to put those together.

 

What aerial photo threads? I must have missed them!

SMF, please!  The SMF is so much easier to read.  Please keep it.  I found myself not enjoying and therefore not visiting the forum as much for the few days of the newer version.  If it ain't broke...

My vote is to keep the SMF forum, unless there was some pressing reason why vBulletin worked better at the server end or something like that. Barring that, it seemed like the transition created a lot of headaches while offering very little benefit in return.

I'm not sure I was ever able to use the vbulletin forum properly, or at least to see any benefit.  Also, my bookmark is www.urbanohio.com as I like to see the most recent posts.  That was never updated...and I kind of had trouble the first time accessing the site, so I thought some bugs were still being worked out.  Each time I checked that link and it was the same, I figured the site was still being worked on so I navigated elsewhere.

 

I guess if you do switch, I would like to see a way to incorporate recent posts into the main page.

 

Thanks!

I think that several of us who voted for SMF would possibly have voted for vbulliten 4.0 if all the kinks would have been worked out and we would have been given more time to play around with it and figure it out more.

For those complaining about the forum being bland, there are plenty of styles out there that could have been experimented with after the site was running smoothly (remember that the SMF forum used to have a different style until recently):

 

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=607b7777230f5cadfd76c8c0195d1dd3&f=247&daysprune=-1&order=desc&sort=voteavg

 

I find it funny that the official thread for vBulletin 4 styles is on a vBulletin 3 forum.

vbulletin seemed to work better with my phone, in terms of fitting the screen and not have to scroll left and right to read posts.  There were also more options for customizing (bold, itallic, etc) your post in a quick reply box.  Those are the only benefits I noticed.

 

For my two cents, the new (vbulletin-v4) is good in theory but the execution of migrating the forum from SMF to vb4 was quite bugging: previous quotes didn't display properly, the registration issues, etc.

 

However, I've been on message boards that use vbulletin and don't mind it.

but I haven't found anything that I dislike about SMF since I became active on UO in the past few months.

I'm fine with keeping it on SMF.

I prefer this forum, the SMF version. The vBulletin was too "busy" for me and I didn't understand the meaning of the colors, codes or symbols. Glad to have this version back again.

 

 

 

I'd murder someone if my wedding on Saturday didn't happen.  MURDER.  I'm just now un-exhausted.  I don't have time to devote to that all over again, lol.

 

Damn. Another gem off the market. :-D

 

 

I'd murder someone if my wedding on Saturday didn't happen.  MURDER.  I'm just now un-exhausted.  I don't have time to devote to that all over again, lol.

 

Damn. Another gem off the market. :-D

 

Oh hush.  I've been off the market as long as you've "known" me.  Actually like 5 years longer than that.

Nothing's ever official until the ink is dry on the license! And then again, in my cousin's case, he only considered married women more of a challenge. :-o

 

Anyway..... Glad to hear your relationship can't be altered, changed or amended as easily as a forum can! (how's that for trying to keep this on-topic!?!?)

 

 

I prefer this one but it would be awesome if we could somehow recover the posts from the 3 day experiment. 

I prefer this one but it would be awesome if we could somehow recover the posts from the 3 day experiment. 

 

We won't be able to recover them all but I can retrieve certain posts for users to report on SMF if they want. All I need is a Pm with the thread and a rough time frame and I'll reply with the post.

I prefer this one but it would be awesome if we could somehow recover the posts from the 3 day experiment. 

 

We won't be able to recover them all but I can retrieve certain posts for users to report on SMF if they want. All I need is a Pm with the thread and a rough time frame and I'll reply with the post.

 

A tip for formers' future reference: if you create your forum posts, especially the photo sets that take a lot of work, offline in a text editor like Word Pad or Notepad and then save them on your hard drive, it's easy to recreate them in the forums if anything unfortunate happens to them. My forum posts are copies of what I put on my site. I maintain a copy of my site on my hard drive where I can test updates before uploading them. I just edit the HTML code and save a copy of the BB code in the corresponding hard drive directory.

I don't know if SMF is the best option out there in the entire universe, but as my nearly-nonexistent post count (for me, anyway) from last week attests, I found the new board extremely cumbersome to use and was sufficiently frustrated that I rapidly gave up even trying.  In addition to the functional difficulties (which might have been straightened out, I guess), I also didn't find it particularly aesthetically pleasant--particularly the way it butchered the formatting on all the old posts, especially the headlines/article excerpts that many posters, not just me, take pains to format into something more than just blocks of text.  I know that the suggestion was made that over time, those threads would simply become less visible, but people *do* go back and read old threads on these forums (and sometimes resurrect them, as well), and the local threads that I visit tend to be Akron-Canton threads that don't have quite the posting rate of the Cleveland ones, so those mangled older posts would have been visible for a lot longer.

 

If there is to be a future upgrade from SMF, I hope it's one that can recognize and preserve the tags/codes for headline size, bold/italic/underline, etc. that people have been using here for a long time now.

vbulletin seemed to work better with my phone, in terms of fitting the screen and not have to scroll left and right to read posts.  There were also more options for customizing (bold, itallic, etc) your post in a quick reply box.  Those are the only benefits I noticed.

 

Funny, it was the opposite for me.  After one or two times of trying to read the forum from my phone, I gave up because the formatting made it too difficult. 

^ I had the same issue. Because there was no mobile version, my phone got bogged down, and many times had issues downloading the full page. Numbers of pages on the index page would overlap the thread title, etc.