What do you think? - forum development options

[Ian]

I would like to know what you think about the possible options for maintaining the forum.

At present we are operating a highly customised installation of vBulletin 3. The current version of vBulleting is version 5.

The version we are running is really not fit for purpose any more, basically because it's too old for our hosting operating software. As the hosting OS updates to add new features and security fixes, older software becomes incompatible. This is the situation we find ourselves in.

If I install vB5 we will have a more reliable forum that has a more modern look and it will work properly on small screen devices like tablets and phones.

The downside is that customisations I know a lot of you are familiar with, like Thanks, Likes, some of the gallery integration, etc., will be lost or need to be replaced.

On the other hand you will be able to share your posts with social media services like Twitter, Facebook and other more easily and that might attract more new users.

If you have any concerns about any of the above I'm keen to hear them before I make any firm decisions.

Thanks,

Ian

[Caz]

Re: What do you think? - forum development options

We'll learn - anyone who has been dealing with Flickr over the past couple of years has had to adapt to survive, they can't seem to keep their layout the same for more than a couple of months!

And sharing to other social media sites would hopefully draw in more users. There again, I'm a "once or twice weekly" visitor rather than daily: it depends on the day job or other stuff I'm doing.

[Ian]

Re: What do you think? - forum development options

Looks like I have stumbled across the cause of the annoying warnings and error messages - a plug-in for managing embedded urls from other sites. I will see if I can fix this pliugin but in the mean time it's disabled.

Ian

[Galantis]

Re: What do you think? - forum development options

We'll learn - anyone who has been dealing with Flickr over the past couple of years has had to adapt to survive, they can't seem to keep their layout the same for more than a couple of months!

And sharing to other social media sites would hopefully draw in more users. There again, I'm a "once or twice weekly" visitor rather than daily: it depends on the day job or other stuff I'm doing.

I would agree on the social media suggestions. It would def generate more traffic to have a twitter account. You would def get a following from me!