Yesterday was a busy time around here. I have a few thoughts on this.
Due to vBulletin no longer patching v3.X for security, this posed a threat, more to HomeSeer than to the users. They had to move to a more secure platform. The risks to we users was minimal since there is little critical personal data that could be breached by a hack. HomeSeer was at risk of the forum being sabotaged, rendered inoperative or hacked for the user database.
While there are a lot of varieties of forum software, I think the choice to stick with vBulletin was the correct one. I went through updating two forums from UBBThreads to vBulletin and we had to relegate several years of information to a read-only archive. This proved to be a disaster for almost a year, because users could not reply to old threads. For HomeSeer this would be 17 years of information. The choice to stick with vBulletin allowed them to retain all of the previous threads in a completely interactive format. I would have made the same choice.
Having made the transition from UBBTHreads to vBulletin in the early 2000s, and later to vBulletin 4 from vBulletin 3, I can say that HomeSeer did a great job making a smooth transition. Each of our tries at transition were difficult at best and required several dry runs before flipping the switch. Even after carefully testing in dry runs, it still took us a week or more to correct problems introduced in the transition. While there were some glitches at the initial rollout yesterday and while some remain, they deserve kudos for how well it went.
When we moved from UBBThreads to vBulletin we had over 10,000 members with about half of them being reasonably active. The number of complaining parties was overwhelming the first day. There were many members who stated they could not deal with the new software and would go away. They ended up staying. Within 48 hours some people began to appreciate some of the new features and within a week many said they wouldn't want to go back. It takes time for people to get accustomed to new and it takes time for the forum administrators to fine tune the settings and add missing features.
There are a lot of changes under the hood in vB5 from vB3 and learning a new workflow to posting links and images is a little challenging, but I remain supportive of the change. This software does all the same things as the old software, but in a different way. After 24 hours, I am already getting comfortable with this new home.
I will continue to let HomeSeer know of problems as I encounter them, but this change has been very close to painless. As I write this post and look at my browser I am virtually certain that I will get so accustomed to this new software that the old will be hard to use. There are many things I like better about vB5. While vB5 is more resource hungry, after adding more cores to the server, this is as fast or faster than vB3.
Due to vBulletin no longer patching v3.X for security, this posed a threat, more to HomeSeer than to the users. They had to move to a more secure platform. The risks to we users was minimal since there is little critical personal data that could be breached by a hack. HomeSeer was at risk of the forum being sabotaged, rendered inoperative or hacked for the user database.
While there are a lot of varieties of forum software, I think the choice to stick with vBulletin was the correct one. I went through updating two forums from UBBThreads to vBulletin and we had to relegate several years of information to a read-only archive. This proved to be a disaster for almost a year, because users could not reply to old threads. For HomeSeer this would be 17 years of information. The choice to stick with vBulletin allowed them to retain all of the previous threads in a completely interactive format. I would have made the same choice.
Having made the transition from UBBTHreads to vBulletin in the early 2000s, and later to vBulletin 4 from vBulletin 3, I can say that HomeSeer did a great job making a smooth transition. Each of our tries at transition were difficult at best and required several dry runs before flipping the switch. Even after carefully testing in dry runs, it still took us a week or more to correct problems introduced in the transition. While there were some glitches at the initial rollout yesterday and while some remain, they deserve kudos for how well it went.
When we moved from UBBThreads to vBulletin we had over 10,000 members with about half of them being reasonably active. The number of complaining parties was overwhelming the first day. There were many members who stated they could not deal with the new software and would go away. They ended up staying. Within 48 hours some people began to appreciate some of the new features and within a week many said they wouldn't want to go back. It takes time for people to get accustomed to new and it takes time for the forum administrators to fine tune the settings and add missing features.
There are a lot of changes under the hood in vB5 from vB3 and learning a new workflow to posting links and images is a little challenging, but I remain supportive of the change. This software does all the same things as the old software, but in a different way. After 24 hours, I am already getting comfortable with this new home.
I will continue to let HomeSeer know of problems as I encounter them, but this change has been very close to painless. As I write this post and look at my browser I am virtually certain that I will get so accustomed to this new software that the old will be hard to use. There are many things I like better about vB5. While vB5 is more resource hungry, after adding more cores to the server, this is as fast or faster than vB3.
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