THE REASONING BEHIND THE MOVE It is always nice to know why things are being done, or even considered. Mick (site owner) has been looking ahead and has decided that the future of the site probably does not lie with the present Forum Software Providers. To keep you in the picture I have included a message from Mick below: "Over the last weeks and months as I've went about looking to stabilise the current software installation and it has become more and more apparent vBulletin is currently not up to job. At this point, in consultation with others, I'm very seriously considering moving us platform. I'd just like to tell everyone how we got here and why we are moving. Background This site was built using the most advanced forum software in the World (vBulletin). It had the biggest market share by far and was the obvious choice in 2009/2010 when I created this incarnation of the site. I have been very careful not to upgrade to newer versions until their stability was well proven. vBulletin owes its success to its founder lead designers but, when Jelsoft (the original owners of vBulletin software) was taken over by American new media company Internet Brands in 2007, disagreements occurred between the lead developers and the new management over matters involving the next major release of vBulletin, version 4.0. As a result most of the development team including the lead developers left and formed Xenforo. After a failed attempt by Internet Brands to sue Xenforo for theft of intellectual rights, Xenforo have gone from strength to strength and have now emerged as a serious threat to vBulletin, building an increasing market share at the expense of vBulletin and Internet Brands, the only other realistic competitor. I had given some thought to moving to the latest version of vBulletin (marketed as Connect 5) and actually purchased a licence. However, having evaluated this version and taken account of reviews I decided that was a precarious route to take at this stage and put that idea on the back burner. I mentioned recently that I would be moving servers (to improve stability) and possibly upgrading to the final version 4 of vBulletin (to improve performance). The move to a more stable server has been accomplished but, without carrying out a considerable amount of work, a vBulletin upgrade would involve losing some of the functionality that we are all used to. In view of that and other considerations (see below) I decided to hold off on the vBulletin upgrade. Considerations Because of the amount of work involved in retaining all the current functionality I have been giving some serious thought as to the future direction of Not606 and, as part of this process have been looking at the emerging competitor to vBulletin, namely Xenforo. Reviews from users of Xenforo, including those who have moved from vBulletin, are very encouraging. Conversely, reviews of vBulletin's newest software are very discouraging. All this has led me to shelve any updates on the vBulletin platform and take an even closer look at Xenforo. There's been quite a few big defections to Xenforo over the last year, one of the biggest being AVForums - you can see their reasoning in this very interesting article here https://www.avforums.com/threads/vbu...letin.1855705/ Provisional Conclusion From all research so far, it would appear that the Xenforo platform is more advanced, more stable and offers greater flexibility than the vBulletin platform. It is evident however that Xenforo lacks some of the functionality we are used to. On balance I have decided that, subject to a continued close watch on developments, assessing the work involved to build the additional functionality and the consequential impact of these on future upgrades, I will be looking to trial Xenforo with a view to a future migration. Please note If I do decide to migrate it will be carried out with little disruption to the current site and forums will only be moved over whenever the majority of people are happy with the new environment. Next Steps I will compile a list of the missing functionality over the next few days and weeks and invite comments as to their importance. In the meantime I ask that everyone have a look on a beta test site I've established with the new software (now removed) I've put a lot of effort over the last few weeks working on the new software, trying to replicate the look, feel and functionality we have here as best I could within the new platform, with its new functionality. There are still quite a few bugs I'll be working through over the next week or so (such as the header doesn't look right when logged in on mobile, etc). Also note the order of forums will not be kept - I think we'll be going with a tabbed forum list, similar to what we have here on our homepage. Password protected forums will be password protected again as well at some point. I'm inviting everyone else to log in and test and leave comments - if you leave bugs or requests I'll make a note of them in the next post and update everyone on their status. There is some obvious missing functionality (blogs, articles) and I'm aware of the need to be able to post things to Newsnow etc, I'll be dealing with these obvious things in the next post. I just want everyone to point out little problems that are maybe now obvious (for instance can everyone log in properly, has anyone's username been corrupted etc). Bear in mind this is based off a backup from 8/10/2019 so any changes to your password / username etc from then will not have been carried over. The beta is not top secret, you can let others know - although I'd maybe hold off posting big sticky threads on it until we're further along (I've still a lot of work to do and it will be going up/down quite a lot). It's a test site, I made a backup as of about 1 hour ago - I'll be periodically restoring backups so any posts etc you make on there will be deleted, eventually. Also please try it out on various devices (ipads, phones, etc) - the big benefit of the new design I've been working on is that it's very responsive, automatically altering it's design to fit whatever device you are using - so there will be no need for separate mobile apps in the future. Return to the Horse Racing Forum Home Page
