I feel completely lost. Change is hard! New Forum

IMO, the old site wasn’t working well. Performance was spotty at best and the lack of ads was beginning to be problematic for COTH. Whether we like seeing ads or not, they are important to COTH to be able to provide both content for their main site and for this BB.

I think we’d all agree with the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ thought but IMO… vB was broken and did need to be replaced. This conversion from vB to Discourse I am sure wasn’t taken lightly. It’s been a huge effort on the technical backend staff. Discourse isn’t vB… neither under the covers or the user interface.

I will confess I don’t use mobile, only desktop. Learning initially wasn’t easy because the user interface is significantly different. But, many of us have grown to like this new platform as we become more comfortable with navigation. There are also many things I like far better in Discourse (quoting from multiple replies, the preview window when I’m typing (I’m sure, desktop only) a reply, seeing replies and topics that have been updated in a neat, clean fashion).

I hope you come to see some of the advantages and benefits that Discourse does offer.

Regardless if you noticed it or not, the old platform was VERY broken.

Many times the things that aren’t working & cause a site to move to a new/upgraded platform, aren’t things the typical user might even be aware of.

Have some fun surfing around here, check out the FAQ.
There is loads of good info there.

I much prefer this site now that I know where things are. It’s so much easier to navigate between forums, even entirely hide forums I don’t want to see, quoting is WAY easier, pictures are WAY easier. I didn’t like it at first - hardly anyone immediately likes a dramatic change. Now, I’d never want to go back to vB

If you have specific questions on how to get where, we can help.

Except it was quite broken and is the entire reason for a move off the vBulletin platform. That’s not even opinion. Performance was degrading, ads were broken, functionality had been lost (the Ignore feature) never to return because it was too much effort to fix an outdated piece of software

I struggle, but someone put so much effort into this new forum, thank you for this!

What was broken about the old format? Even with my very slow rural internet, it always worked fine for me. Only thing I missed was an Ignore feature. Posting worked, direct messaging worked, quoting and multiquoting worked, notifications worked – what was broken?

Do we have an Ignore feature now, btw?

It had crashed and was down for a couple of days. Vbulletin was not providing support. It was slow and not functioning right (there are several threads on that in the technical help forum). Quote and multi quote were not working right. After the crash the ads were not working. People more technically minded than I can go make a more complete list, but it for sure was not working right and it did need to be replaced.

The instructions on how to use that feature are in the linked thread.

One of the hard-stop broken things about the old forum is that the software was increasingly out of date with the underlying internet platform that all websites share.

Aside from the actual COTH forums, there is a sort of worldwide software platform used by all the transmission and hosting points of the internet (not owned by COTH). All internet software interacts with it. Over recent years this underlying platform has been undergoing substantial changes and upgrades. So, older internet sites that were coded for the old platform are less and less functional on the new one. Sooner rather than later, old internet software will no longer function at all. This is not something visible to users – until things are past the point of no return and just stop working.

That was a problem with the old COTH forum software that was going to kill it sooner rather than later, if nothing was done. And, having waited as long as they did to upgrade, the next step up has become a very long step from what we had before.

As an analogy with the old COTH forum, it’s like we’ve been living in a house that has a deteriorating foundation. We can keep living there and act as if nothing is happening, but it’s going to happen anyway. If we wait long enough, the walls start cracking, the floors are uneven, the roof leaks, even the plumbing starts leaking as the moving foundation moves the pipes (that’s kind of where old COTH was at, so much leaking that things were rather damp).

We can continue living there and ignoring or working around these things, as more and more problems develop. But if nothing is done then eventually the house will no longer be habitable, and will finally slowly collapse. Old COTH was well on the way to that status, even if we the residents couldn’t see the leaks and uneven floors and other problems.

During the course of this slow deterioration, we have the option to put money and resources into a series of major fixes that will take care of the problems and save the house. But if we do nothing for long enough, the house may go past the point of recovery. We’ll have to tear that one down and build a new one.

That’s kind of what COTH did, replace a house that was far gone with a new house that will last long into the future. With a whole new set of fancy appliances that work differently from the old ones. They did save the interior furnishings and photo albums to move into the new house (forum topic sections and the historical content). As it were. But the new house, and the new appliances, are such a step forward from the old one, it takes a lot of getting used to.

We moved out of The Addams Family house and into Frasier’s upscale condo. As it were.

That’s my analogy.

That’s a great way to put it @OverandOnward!!!

The old COTH hosting site had not just a crash, but a hack, that thankfully the hackers only destroyed stuff, but didn’t get anyone’s private information.
It was a close call and warning that something had to be done and, as others have said, the jump from such an old rickety but well loved system to this newfangled one has been hard, for everyone.
Administrators, Moderator, all posters had to cowboy/girl up and learn how to live in a different system, no easy task for anyone, you are right that the adjustments were and still are hard.

Keep asking questions and you will be up to speed quickly, as more are now able to help you along, having been there too.

As for the ignore/muting function, you will be surprised to see you now can ignore for a bit, for a few hours, for a day or two, forever, one poster, several, a whole forum even!
You also have a way to incognito peek at what you have on mute if curiosity gets the best of you at times.
That is now a multi-function, enjoy it any way you like to try it.

skydy beat me to the great analogy.

The hard part for all of us is that we usually see just the ‘user interface’ not what’s being the curtain (think the Wizard in Oz). Some of us have varying degrees of awareness/knowledge of what’s behind the curtain but most… we see what we see, we don’t know how the magic happens, it just does until it doesn’t.

I do like that we are now using more ‘contemporary’ software, light, bright, clean instead of the old creaky boat. Maybe there are things I don’t like (although at this point, there are very few) and for me, on the desktop, this is an incredible improvement. Performance at the end with vB was such that if COTH didn’t get this upgrade done, it was getting harder and harder for me to get anything remotely resembling decent performance.

What worldwide software platform are you referencing here?

Well, to be fair, the new platform was virtually non workable for quite a number of days, as well. I can’t imagine there’s any format that won’t have a problem at some point. The old format worked fine for me. I don’t expect anything to never have a problem – citing one crash doesn’t seem convincing reason for me – we could use the same reasoning to ditch the new platform, because it did NOT work to a useable degree at all for quite a number of days.

I certainly had no performance problems with the vBulletin version, right up to the end – loaded fine, quickly, etc. No performance issues at all. All features worked, except of course when the whole forum was down.

Maybe it is hard as a poster to realize all the spammers that the filters catch, that Moderator bans, some of those are trying to hack the web site trolling for information.

The trouble is, the old format was not secure enough and didn’t support the new security programs any more.
The whole needed way more work than just using a new one with all the newest privacy and security available today.
That is why the new one.

Similar to a poster trying to work with a dozen year old computer that won’t even accept upgrades any more, if at all any are still written for those old computers, which they are not any more.

We can drive an old Model T car down the highways.
At a maximum speed of 35 mph, you really don’t want to be trying to manage today’s highway traffic.
It would take you forever to get anywhere and if it breaks, you can’t find parts for it any more.

And that’s a thing of the past, so irrelevant to the current situation.

It may be just “one crash” to you, but behind it all, it was a serious hack that really opened the eyes to the power that be just how out of date and vulnerable vB had gotten, and it wasn’t even just that one incident.

At some point, the return on investment of patching up old, outdated, unsupported software slows to 0 really quickly, and becomes much more costly to maintain.

The issues in the beginning here are GONE. They were an artifact of a pretty significant transition between very, very different software services. There is absolutely no comparing the increasing struggles of a dinosaur forum platform, and the growing pains of a conversion to a new piece of software. None.

Uhh, no, they didn’t. Ignore stopped working a long time ago. There were lots of issues trying to edit posts that got them sent to Unapproved Hell. Unapproved post in general were a growing problem.

Not everyone experienced all the problems, but if you spent any time in the Technical Help section (which you can still visit), you’d see the issues people had. It was not a fully functional piece of software in the end, and not for a while, especially once the ads were having problems and we spent the last many months, the straw that broke the camel’s back, without ads as a result.

Well, the crash of the old forum was resolved, so you could say that is irrelevant, too – you can’t cherry pick incidents/criticisms and apply them for one platform and not the other.

The thread had moved into “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” themes, and that’s when I commented. If you think my points are irrelevant, you can flag my posts for a mod to review. I think I was completely on topic. And my comparisons are quite relevant – user experience is relevant – good or bad, and regardless of the cause of that experience. My experience with the old platform was very satisfactory. With the new one, it’s unsatisfactory. Dissatisfaction/“feel completely lost” is the thread title, after all. We’re allowed to not like the new format, and to praise the old one.

If you read thru the technical forum, you will see that most don’t like plenty in the new one, mostly that is different and in ways many don’t like and have said just that.
Of course is allowed to not like the new format?

What some are trying to explain, a change was coming, we had been warned, told why, was clear it was needed.
What the change to was, that was for those running the site to decide and this one, for their own reasons, is what we got.

Now we need to buckle up and ride it forward, is what we have.
As the users of so much we find here given to us, going by the old “don’t look at a gift horse in the mouth”, as it were.
We can grumble, but it is what it is.
Lets learn how to ride along makes sense.

Well, no, because as stated, the reason for the crash was not something that could be risked again. Are you really saying you were ok with a board, for which advertisers pay lots of money to have their ads shown, being constantly bandaided together to defensively deal with hackers, all while advertisers were not getting their ads presented?

That’s ENTIRELY different from the issues that are common with a migration to a whole new platform, where you are making positive improvements and user requested modifications that will be a constant going forward.

That’s like saying you’re ok with a rusted out floorboard in an old VW station wagon, just keep adding piles of newspapers there so your feet don’t fall through, and then complain about and equate it to a new car whose timing belt broke because it was defective but was easily fixed. Not. The. Same.

Of course you’re free to dislike this, and get all nostalgic for the old, but the old platform was not a valid option any more, for all the reasons stated

Truly - go read through the #technical-help-forum and see if you think it was working just fine as it was. Can’t Like posts, can’t send PMs, unapproved posts, “is anyone finding COTH periodically unreachable”, can’t edit posts, and the list goes on. That doesn’t sound fully functional to me.

And maybe the most critical at all - ads weren’t working. No ads, no forum.

The old site had been hacked twice in the past year, due to security vulnerabilities with the old platform. It fortunately did not compromise private user information and we were able to restore all of the content on the site…but what if that was not the case?

The development team has for years needed to basically place Band-Aids behind the scenes to keep vBulletin running and added all sorts of customizations to allow us to offer some of the features that we did. And apparently anytime you needed to update the software, you basically had to tear it all down, update and build it back up again, which made keeping the software properly updated to implement safety patches and other updates very difficult.

This decision was not taken lightly, because it required a huge investment in time and money, but we decided to bite the bullet. It was a change that had to be made for the viability of the site, and we decided to do it now instead of trying to continue to hobble along behind the scenes, sticking fingers in leaks in the dam until the whole thing burst and flooded the village!

Resolved in that after the hack and extended outage, the board was back but without the full range of functionality that had been custom integrated into the software pre-hack. I don’t know that I would consider that ‘resolved’, more back up and running. And that ‘crash’ was so much more than a ‘crash’… there was a significant amount of work that took place to get the board back up and running, not a simple ‘restore the backup’.

I’d like to know how often you visited. I visited, or tried to, many times every day. Sometimes I’d be lucky and performance would be acceptable (not as good as what we’re currently experiencing here). Sometimes it was just about unusable it was so slow. Or, I seem to recall you said you were rural, your overall internet performance may be slower than what some of us are used to.

Exactly. There was so much functionality that had been lost over time.

This is, for COTH, the most important thing. We may not be fond of ads, but without selling advertising (or subscriptions), hard for COTH to exist.

And I, for one, am glad you guys did bite the bullet and do the conversion. Not always fun for any of us at times, not always easy for any of us at times (including COTH devs and mods ) but IMO, totally the correct decision.