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Well, the latest vb update has screwed up our blog links in our profiles and I keep getting a db error message in the blog email system. *stabs vb* release a gold version already!

The new vbulletin should be released in a beta version sometime in the second quarter of 2009. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=293772 They are finally going to make a new default style, they're also going to make a CMS (content management system), so we can finally change the main ancientclan.com site into something more than a splash page while keeping it integrated into the forums. Yay! And the other really nice thing is that all the attachment problems will finally be fixed. Once they have the new attachment system finished, whenever we upload any image to our blog, the forums or our personal albums, they'll all be integrated. So if we upload a pic to the forum as an attachment it'll be available in our albums as well. And if you upload pics to your album, you can easily attach them into a post by clicking a little button and then choosing any pics from any of your albums to be inserted into any of your posts. And it also sounds like they're going to integrate the blog, albums and social groups into the overall forum too. Everything should be alot spiffier. I'm guessing they'll release the beta around april or may.

One of the people at vBulletin posted a blog entry showing what we should expect the new default vb style to look like. Seeing as me n lady like to make new styles based off the vbulletin default one, it should change the overall look of the forums. Click this link for some pics of what it'll look like: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php?b=2360

vBulletin Suite vs. vBulletin - vBulletin Community Forum In answer to some of the questions about this... Why will these components only be available as part of the Suite? There are two reasons for this change. The first is that with so many separate components, keeping them synchronized was unnecessarily inefficient from a coding standpoint. There's just too much engineering overhead to maintain them all on separate development tracks. And since we want to be able to develop quickly and get releases out to you more frequently, we made the decision to keep all components in sync as part of a single code base. The second reason is that it provides much greater opportunities for tighter integration between the products, such as the ability to convert blog posts (or forum posts) to articles, to have forum discussions attached to CMS content, etc. The whole idea is to make vBulletin better, faster, and these changes will help us develop new features more quickly. They will also help as we dive into the deeper round of rearchitecture with 4.1 and 4.2. Does that mean I'll be running lots of extra code? No. vBulletin runs only the code it needs for any given page load, so if you're not using a component, its code won't run and it won't impact the performance of the application. Can I turn off components I don't want to use? Yep, just turn them off from the Admin CP, and they'll be disabled. Once again vb is pissing me off. We spent the extra one time fee of $50 for the blog addon. But since they are changing their packages and price structures around, they are going to dick people over. They still have not announced their price structures or upgrade fees, but now we definitely know that upgrading to vb4 suite will cost us money. They will no longer sell their add-on products individually anymore, which means that we'll have to upgrade to the vBulletin suite to continue getting updates for the blog add-on we already have. This is retarded. I wouldn't mind getting the vbulletin cms, I was planning on it actually. But unless it was worth another $50 (or whatever the price they're changing it to now) I wouldn't buy it. But, now we'll have to buy the suite upgrade which includes the CMS, Blog and Project Tools just to continue getting updates for the blog! WTF!? We have absolutely no need for the Project Tools add-on. If we were still a hosting company we could have used it for a support desk, but we no longer have a need for anything like that now. So thanks alot vb. I hope to god the cost to upgrade to the suite is low because if the price is to high, I'll be willing to spend the little extra cash to switch over the IPB just to spite your fucking money hungry, non-supportive, no major scheduled updates company. And their CMS better be something fucking amazing and have a gallery built into it, because if its just a page maker or a rip-off of vb advanced (free) like the blog is a slightly better rip-off of wordpress (free), then I am going to be even more seriously pissed off.

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*

I came across a website that was using vbulletin, but had a facebook chat bar.. I thought, wtf? But after looking around a bit, I stumbled across this site: http://www.cometchat.com/ Interesting. I wouldn't mind having a feature like this on AC. It be like a built in instant messenger. Very spiffy.

*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*

A single setting on my test vbulletin 4 (which uses a copy of this forum's databse) screwed up all my blog attachment images. And they've probably been screwed up for about a week. I just found out and it really annoys the hell out of me because if I remember correctly, the damn setting on vb4 wouldn't let me change the directory, it only said "Click here to import your blog attachments into the new attachments structure." So I clicked it thinking nothing of it. The images loaded, except here it is a week later I finally realize that it moved the images from the directory on the live forum instead of from the directory from the test forum. Damn! POS! At least I still have copies of everything and I should be able to fix everything by putting the copies back into the right folder. I hate it when a program makes me waste time.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?363883-Internet-Brands-claims-against-Xenforo http://xenforo.com/community/threads/internet-brands-claims-against-xenforo.4727/ Internet Brands, the parent company of vBulletin has filed a lawsuit against Xenforo because XF is developed by former vBulletin head developers and are directly competing with their product. Apparently there maybe contractual breaches from the developers former employment with IB. Of course, customers of vBulletin that were pissed off at vB/IB before are even more pissed off because of this lawsuit. The discussions in the private customer forum at vbulletin.com are only available to licensed owners so its pointless to post a link to it, but there are alot of aggravated customers complaining. Who will win the lawsuit? What software platform will become king in the future? And what about Invisionboard who is lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce on the weakened victor? The forum drama continues...

If anyone can remember the old bulletin board software wars from years ago, you would remember an old major player called ikonboard. This software was a phpBB, UBB and vBulletin rival back in the day. But after they got purchased by a bigger company they lost alot of their users when the old developers of ikonboard broke away and created invision power board. Shortly after ikonboard became pretty obsolete. Now the same thing is happening with vBulletin. vBulletin was purchased by Internet Brands and became more commercial and money hungry. The main developers of vB left the company and just recently announced that they are making a new forum software called xenforo. Which can be found at http://xenforo.com/ Could this possibly be history repeating itself? Will xenforo replace vbulletin in the near future just like invision power board replaced ikonboard? Only time will tell.

vBulletin has updated their vBulletin 5 Connect demo.. Heres a prime example of the horrible crap of vbulletin's sofware and one of the obvious reasons we stopped using their product. vBulletin custom page example: http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/custom_page Yay, I could have put text on a page. Here is an example of a random test page that I made on ipb: http://www.ancientclan.com/test.html I have the ability to put anything from the database onto any page I want and in whatever format I want it to appear in. Huge difference. Sure vb allows custom blocks and html, but if it was anything as advanced as IPB, you would think they would have made a better example.

vBulletin went straight from beta 28 to Gold release with no release candidate versions and they even upgraded their official forums to it. WTF. There is no member list, no users online list. Notifications are horrible, its buggy as hell and looks like crap. http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/ The only thing it has going for it IMO is that the mobile version looks decent on a cell phone screen.. but even then I came across some 503 errors and pages that failed to load. So buggy. They say "Enjoy a clean, up-to-date design that supports easier forum navigation for members and visitors alike." I don't care for their idea of 'clean, up-to-date' it doesn't look up-to-date to me at all. In fact the page navigation floats at the top of the screen in large forums with multiple pages of topics. It took me a minute to even realize it was there. For a basic default skin, this looks horrible. It has less than half the features of vB 3.8 and searching doesn't work. All the search results are "unexpected_error"

I haven't liked vBulletin for some time now and mostly put that forum software behind me except for the occasional jab about how bad their software is. I came across this interesting update from PC Gamer the other day... with a part that I emphasized: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/26/why-forums-and-comments-are-still-offline/ http://mos.futurenet.com/forum/ I don't visit PC Gamer's website, so I'm not certain what version of vB they were using, but this is pretty huge. The took all of their entire network's vBulletin powered forums offline because it was exploited. Well PC Gamer, I suggest you switch to Invision Power. vBulletin has really gone downhill and I'm glad we stopped using their software when we did.

I received this email today: After logging into vbulletin's site, I changed my password and checked out the client forums. vBulletin's software was compromised, again. Earlier this year, PCGamers forum was hacked and then earlier in July, Ubuntu forums was hacked. And just the other day vbulletin.com, vbulletin.org and MacRumors were all hacked. All of the sites were running vbulletin software. References: http://blog.canonical.com/2013/07/30/ubuntu-forums-are-back-up-and-a-post-mortem/ http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/12/macrumors-forums-security-leak/ https://www.facebook.com/inj3ct0rs/posts/611793255548704 http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/vbulletin-announcements/vbulletin-announcements_aa/4007195-important-message-regarding-your-account http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=304626 I'm glad we stopped using this software when we did. vbulletin.org runs vb 3 which is what we were running in the end before switching to Invision Power Board. If vb3 is now vulnerable, then all the numerous sites still using it are at risk. Anyone that has used the same password on all sites, should not use any password they have previously used on any vBulletin site. The Ubuntu and MacRumors sites were hacked because a moderator account was broken into. The vBulletin.com and vBulletin.org sites have not stated how they were hacked into, nor do they have a fix for this exploit because it is "being looked into."

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.

There was an exploit discovered in the ibProArcade modification that we use to run our arcade. I checked our log files and we were not compromised. I disabled the arcade for now. And once an updated version is released I will re-open our arcade. The updated version is scheduled to be released this weekend. (edit) The arcade is re-opened!

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.

This weekend I will be upgrading our test site/copy of Ancient Clan to vBulletin 4. Once that is done, I'll work on converting ALL our styles to the current vB4 default style. Once I have all of them converted. I will upgrade Ancient Clan to vBulletin 4. The new vb is definitely looking much much better compared to 2 flippin years ago.. *sigh* if only the current version was released 2 years ago. Gah!

I made an album with some screenshots of vbulletin's default theme and the yu yu hakusho one that is now completed. The pictures in the album did not upload in the correct order, but if you can see which ones to compare: http://forums.ancientclan.com/album.php?albumid=60 Anyway, I'll be working on more styles this week/weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade our main forums the weekend after that.. assuming vBulletin actually releases their maintenance release by then. (its only about a month behind schedule. )

So.... after the initial blah conversion to vbulletin 4 didn't turn out so good we switched back to vb3 and decided to wait on vb4 to become a better product.. or find another software package to use.. and seeing as we are not in a position to drop hundreds of dollars on another software package and vbulletin 3 is going to soon be EOL (end of life = no future updates or security patches), we will eventually upgrade the site to vbulletin 4 again sometime this year. At least now, vb4 has a mobile skin for cellphone users and a somewhat workable process for converting our themes. Of course our themes will not look the same.. much as when we have switched from one software to another over the years, we will have to adjust.

So I upgraded our test forum to vb 4.0.6 two days ago and its finally usable as far as I can tell. The only thing holding back the live upgrade is the themes. After I get a couple themes upgraded for use with vb 4, we'll upgrade the main forums/site. This could be this weekend, maybe next. It all depends on how long it takes me with these themes. The only theme that is currently done is the Yu Yu Hakusho theme. And of course the horribly blinding default vbulletin 4 theme. The sanji theme, maybe all blue and maybe one more theme will be done before we upgrade. yu yu hakusho theme is dark, the sanji theme is bright, (but not blinding like the vb4 theme), and all blue is medium. After the initial 3-4 themes are done, I won't work on any more themes until vb 4.1 comes out which is supposed to streamline the theme process.

Its been quite a while since I've mentioned vB 4.0 and AC's eventual upgrade to it. But low and behold, vb might actually have a usable product soon. Their new version 4.0.4 which is due out sometime next week may finally be up to a minimum standard that we can use. Once it is released, I'll be updating my test forum and trying out their new theme/style generator and looking over all the new bells and whistles and bug fixes. If it all adds up to something we can actually use, we may finally upgrade our forums... if not, then we'll probably wait again.. I'll update everyone if it looks promising.

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.

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*

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.