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On Wednesday 22nd at 8 a.m. East Coast we are moving from our old faithful forum software, vBulletin, to a newer application called XenForo.
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On Wednesday 22nd at 8 a.m. East Coast we are moving from our old faithful forum software, vBulletin, to a newer application called XenForo.
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You can expect pretty much everything to be different, so there will be lots of fun
This has been in the planning for over a year now, and is finally going live. It isn't easy moving a giant forum to a new application, so it's taken some time to do.
Leaving vBulletin is the biggest change we have ever made, and is designed to improve just about every aspect of the forum and its wider presence on the web. For example Google is about to penalise websites that have poor mobile device performance, and that would have hurt us even more than vB's old code system does. XenForo, our new system, is a fork of vB and built by the original coders. As is very common in the software world, coders leave and start afresh, and that's what happened with XenForo - it gave them a chance to start again from scratch, and with more modern code. vB is a bit of a lumbering old dinosaur in the modern world, and XF will give us a chance to improve lots of things.
Part of the problem is that web code changes over the years, but unless the people running an application (called the 'project', or the 'developers or 'devs') are prepared to rebuild from the ground up every now and then, an older application gradually becomes more and more of a clunker. XF is a new start and a better prospect in the new internet, especially with the very strong mobile direction the web has now: there are now more mobiles out there than PCs, so a website - no matter what type it is - has to work well for mobiles. Only newer applications can do this, as the old stalwarts were good in their day but can't be changed except with major surgery. We have been talking about changing for a very long time as it was obvious we needed to, but doing it is very time-consuming and very expensive on this scale. Now it's done.
vB has served us well since 2008. We started on phpBB in 2007, then went to vB in 2008, and now XF for 2015. It's a new era and everything is changing - the web, and soon vaping itself, due to the regulations coming in, will never be the same.
The EU regs are draconian and if they are unchallenged, will mean that EU-based forums will probably have to close or change drastically (no ecig advertising will be allowed). The FDA regs are expected soon, and as yet we don't know what effect that will have on forums - let's hope not as bad as the EU version. At least the new forum software puts us in a better position to change whatever needs doing in order to stay online.
On Wednesday 22nd April we enter a new era for ECF. A new era for vaping won't be too long coming around either. It's going to be all-change from now on, some of it good and some not so good. Let's hope we all get through these changes OK.
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