Announcement of an impending move to Xenforo forums and the technical reasons

Speed
Recently Gardeners Corner has been running much slower due to the fact our vBulletin install is badly outdated, vBulletin's latest version apart from being very glitchy is even slower than the vBulletin we're on presently.

Xenforo is one of the fastest and optimised software on the market with much lower server strain resulting in better speed.

Security
vBulletin has not been an overly secure software in 2 years, even the latest versions have a string of critical security flaws requiring constant patching.

Our version of vBulletin reached end of life over a year ago (think like the 'use by' date on food), and just recently we were hacked exploiting a fault in the aging software.

Such a hack if not stopped when it was, could have resulted in thousands of member accounts and their computers infected with virus and malware.

Stability
As our current software ages, more and more functionality is being lost due to outdated coding languages and scripts, resulting in a much less stable browsing experience for members and a much more costly platform to maintain for staff, both in time and money.

Xenforo our new software
Xenforo was created by the lead developer of vBulletin 3 before he left the company over disagreements with the path they were taking for development (basically vBulletin become shoddy and cost about twice as much).

The software uses the latest coding protocols and security features and apart from being much quicker than vBulletin, it also offers a much more user-friendly forum experience .

About the Move
The move will take place on Sunday 4th March 2012 starting about 6.30am and concluding sometime before 9am on the following day, the site will be unavailable to members during this time.

However it is possible the move could be concluded faster and be back online the late afternoon/evening of that day. Updates will be posted on gardeners corner's twitter account which can be found here https://twitter.com/#!/gc_forum

 

This is great news. Some of the features of Xenforo look fantastic. Looking forward to this.

Do we get real time thread updating as standard?

 

Is there a tickle button on there???

 

Numpties like me will be asking ... will I have to do anything? Only I'm still on 'the pills' from when we had to reset passwords and 'things' in March last year.

 

Does that mean more smillies!!!!!!!

Val

 

Fidget, thanks for asking that,

Thanks also to admin for the new software and that work that entails to set it up.

Will I need to register again would have been my question after reading this topic....

 

Do you mean if you leave a thread open that it will "gain" any new messages?

If so I don't think so, but the Alerts will tell you that the thread has been updated, and from what I've seen that works well (when you do something in a different thread, post a reply for example, a little tag appears next to the message you just adding saying something like "You have 999 alerts" and then you can hover the mouse over the Alerts menu an a list of recent alerts appears (threads that have changed, PMs, all sorts of things that can select to show, or not), so you are likely to KNOW that the thread has changed in short-order.

But, FWIW, on here I just keep pressing "Quick links : Today's posts" and reading anything "new" that I am interested in.

You can always link a smilie from another site as an IMG image of course ...

Nah, they won't make it that hard, but you might need to change some of the options set on your account - e.g. a new feature might be turned ON for everyone, and if you hate it you'll have to turn it OFF.

 

I'm sure it will be great if only i knew what it all meant...
No worries i'l catch up:D

 

As avatar pics, signature links, etc. regularly get lost during upgrades (and I'm not saying that will happen again this time), it may be a good idea to get the details ready for updating your User CP following the changeover.

 

Once upon a time I found working at the leading edge of technology was fun.
Nowadays 'the leading edge' feels more like 'the bleeding edge'. :o

 

Spring style has been copied over almost exactly as our vb version