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Some answers to important licensing questions - vBulletin Community Forum With so many vbulletin customers bitching about the possibility of vBulletin charging for an upgrade to the vb 4 code, vbulletin has finally announced that they will not charge for the upgrade... but they will be implementing new license terms.. with their current terms they were obligated to not charge for a new major version upgrade. But my guess is that the new terms will allow them to make as much money as possible by screwing people over on future upgrades. The f*cking vbulletin suite upgrade better be reasonably priced. *shakes fist at vb*

*blogging my VB vs. IPB crap for future reference* ________________________________ vBulletin = FAIL [ame=http://forums.ancientclan.com/showthread.php?t=9752"]vBulletin = FAIL - Ancient Clan Forums[/ame] Here is the email I received from vbulletin: The vbulletin team announced that vBulletin 4.0 would come out by the end of June 2009. It is October 14th today and with an announcement like this and a new website, you would think vbulletin 4.0 has finally been released! But no! It is still in alpha testing, there is no demo available and I have been given the opportunity to purchase the upgrade to the suite for the $130 discount for only 16-17 more days. And they still have not announced when the vb 4.0 version will even come out. And even though I bought the blog add-on for $50 a year ago, I get the same discount price as someone who only owns just the forum license. wtf. When my license support renewal is up, which last year would have costed me $40 for updates, will now cost me $195 for the new license if I haven't paid the $130 or more by then to download vbulletin 4.0 which may still not be out by then considering they are 4 months behind schedule with no product. So. We will probably continue running vb 3.8 until we find another alternative or vbulletin changes their pricing structure (which I'm sure they won't). I wouldn't mind paying for new forum software, we've spent plenty on vb over the years with renewal costs and one time purchases. But I can't justify staying with the company because of the part I have put in bold above. If we use just the forums and pay the initial upgrade price of $195 or so in january and switch to a free blog system because the version we have won't be compatible with vb 4.0... we'll still be stuck with another issue. Once vb 5.0 comes out (which should be 12-18 months according to a staff member), we'll have to buy a brand new vbulletin license for version 5 at the full price of another $195. And assuming a new major release then comes out every 1 or 2 years, it'll be hundreds of dollars every year or two just to keep using this software that still doesn't do everything I want it to do. I'm really starting to hate vbulletin. If I want to stay with this forum software, the only way I'll save money is by paying the cheaper upgrade cost of $130 which gives me the entire suite, but I only have 16 days to make my decision or pay $200 in January and only get the forum software. WTF! Anyone have any forum or blog recommendations? I was thinking about invision power board, but they're in the process of releasing a new cms like system and I don't know if that will be bundled in with their current suite. But even ipb is $250 for the suite with $60 renewal costs. But even that price is better than the new vbulletin price structure. Apparently, I have to make a decision within 16 days. *kicks vB in the balls*

The improvements they are making to IPB look really great. Some of the highlights for me: http://community.invisionpower.com/blog/1174/entry-9537-ips-40-editor-part-1-content/ Embeds will always work. Now that is a huge difference. http://community.invisionpower.com/blog/1174/entry-9538-ips-40-editor-part-2-uploads/ Drag and drop images right into the editor. I've been waiting for this feature. No more having to click attach and then navigate to the right folder where your image is.. just drag it right into the editor. http://community.invisionpower.com/blog/1174/entry-9539-ips-40-editor-part-3-customisation-and-bbcode/ This is a big change and I hope they pull it off correctly. All our custom bbcodes will be negated. But the only custom bbcode we actually use is the spoiler tag, which will now be a default feature. All other custom bbcodes will now have to be created as CKEditor plugins.. but there are already a lot of ckeditor plugins available. So I could technically add a variety of new editor features. http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/388306-ips-40-editor-part-4-special-features/ Very very nice. I like this. Good! No more having to click the load saved content option. Simplifying this will make the auto save much better. Oh! and the editor will now be fully skin-able! The editor won't have to be glaring white on a dark theme anymore. Also, the current skins that we use are going to be upgraded for IPB 4.0. We won't have to change the entire look of the site.

At some point we'll be at new data center.. I'm not entirely certain when it'll happen. Probably within the next couple days. The old server was in NJ, this server will be in MD. We might get a bit faster load times. The site will not go down and there is no planned maintenance. In fact everything is being transferred live with no down time. I've also been meaning to optimize AC for increased performance, load times, etc. because this site could potentially be significantly faster if I put some effort into troubleshooting a couple things.. but I'm holding off on doing that until we upgrade to IPB4 sometime later this year.

I finished an upgrade to the site, which included an editor upgrade and updated skin fixes. So far it looks like everything is fine, but I'm still not caring for this editor. In firefox, the quote feature seems a bit off. After you hit quote, you should hit an arrow button before typing or pasting to make it look correct. I'll have to fill out a bug report for it. Let me know if anyone comes across any errors or problems.

This is a major announcement about our community.. We are finally ditching vBulletin! We will be switching to Invision Power Board software. We should retain all posts, post counts, albums, private messages, etc. Expect major changes with the overall site. We will be turning ancientclan.com into an actual website again. But it will not be anime based. We have had a good run as an anime site, but its time for us to move away from that specific genre and move towards a more general entertainment website focusing more on movies, television series, video games, anime, things that interest us, etc. How does this affect our current forums? 1) We will no longer have anime themes. We will save some of our current themes for their color layouts and will be implementing them into different color selections for the site. 2) We will be taking all our current forums, setting them as subforums into an Archive category and we will set them for archived so they will get no new posts but will be available for everyone to view. 3) We will only have a handful of forums. No more anime series specific forums, etc. 4) We will have a variety of new features, I'll get a new shoutbox back up, we will have a full functioning gallery, improved blogs, and an article system for the main site. The conversion process will be in two parts. First, I will need to install the new software. Second, I will run the conversion software to import all our posts, etc, into the new database. There is no timetable yet for when this will happen. But it will happen sometime in the next 2-3 weekends. If you have any questions, please ask.

I haven't had the time to work on the new vb betas or release candidate versions in almost a month. Just recently though, vb has made some good progress. So we'll be upgrading the test site and I'll begin working on upgrading our themes over the next 2-3 weekends. Once enough progress has been made we'll upgrade the main forum/site probably sometime in January.

I updated the forums and the chatbox today. If you come across any issues, please let me know.

Theres an upgrade to the current version of vb 3 that we are currently using. It has a couple bug fixes and a security fix that we'll probably upgrade to later today. Nothing at all like vb 4 and nobody will even see a difference. Its just all backend stuff to make what we have run a little more efficiently. Also, since we've decided to put vb4 work off for the foreseeable future, I'm going to try the vb4/vb3 compatible chat box upgrade so it'll finally work correctly like it was for vb4. I'll also fix my current youtube code and probably make a new hulu and dailymotion one as I don't think the media embedding mod we used is fixed, or will work correctly anytime soon.

Sometime soon (either tonight or sometime in the next couple days) I'll be doing a couple minor upgrades to the forums. So don't be surprised if the forums go offline at some point while an upgrade takes place. I don't see how the upgrade could take longer than 5-10 minutes so if you see any pop-up password blocks or you see a message about the forum being upgraded, just check back in a little bit.

After much consideration, we have decided to stick with vBulletin for our forum software. (AC Fest attendees found this out last weekend. ) We took advantage of the pre-sale discount a couple weeks ago. That way we could still re-sale the license if we decided to switch at a later date if we weren't impressed with what vB 4.0 looks like. Over the past week, vBulletin has a revealed it's CMS software and as of last night, the beta has become available to 4.0 license holders. Which means that we'll be installing a test board sometime this weekend and begin work on converting our themes in order of popularity as discussed in this topic: [ame=http://forums.ancientclan.com/showthread.php?t=9083]New vBulletin layout to screw over our themes, need your feedback! - Ancient Clan Forums[/ame] Admins, and mods will have access to the beta. If any other members would like to help me test things out on the test board/site, please send me a pm.

vBulletin still hasn't released its newest 4.0 version yet, so we have another maintenance update to perform. This update should only take a few minutes once I start it, so don't expect much if any downtime.

I updated the server to the latest php today. I also enabled some different modules to get a better performance boost out of the server. If anyone comes across any error pages of any kind, please let me know. Other than that, the forums should load a bit faster now.

So yeah, this will be more of a rant than an actual update but its relevant because its about the core software that runs our community. [ame=http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=313353]vBulletin 4.0 Development Update - vBulletin Community Forum[/ame] vBulletin's initial plans were to release vb 4 in beta testing by the end of the second quarter of this year, which would have been the end of July. That hasn't happened. Everyone in the vb community has been wondering about the progress vb 4 has been taking and finally they have given us an update. 4-5 weeks for alpha testing. If we are lucky we'll get to upgrade AC to vb 4 beta 2 by the end of august or early september. Unfortunately, even then they may not release it in beta version to the community because they may try screwing us all by forcing us to pay for an upgrade for the first time. If vb would release more info on what their plans are and set some actual release dates or prices for their highly anticipated upgrades and add-on products they'd set alot of minds at ease. Unfortunately, they are only making people resent purchasing their product to begin with.

The next vBulletin update should be released in beta by the end of this month or the beginning of the next. That will be the upgrade that will include the new style layout which will screw over our current themes and some of our plugin mods/extra features. However, there should be quite a few new features that should compensate for whatever we may loose. And as far as I know, the arcade should work in vB 4.0. Shortly after vB 4.0 is released, vBulletin will release their custom cms which we will probably purchase and make Ancient Clan into an actual site again instead of just a forum. But we'll have to see what functionality that program has before we make more definative plans at this point. Just keep in mind that changes are coming to AC... soon. and I better be impressed with what vbulletin comes out with. *kicks vb*

I haven't done this in a while so I'm a bit rusty at it. But I just optimized the server for the first time in probably a year. As soon as one more upgrade is finished everything on the server, especially the forums, should load much faster and smoother. Let me know if you see any differences.