Ditchmonkey

Aha I get it all now. It's different than vbulletin but I don't dislike it. I'm not sure making titles bold to match vbulletin functionality when the functionality is just different anyway so I think I'll hold off on that.

But that doesn't explain why the results for "view new content" differed from the threads marked as unread in the forum view. Is "new content" and "unread content" handled separately?

What was wrong with wolfies code was that it shifted the thread titles way to the right and created a bunch of extra blank space. This could have been a copy and paste error on my part. I thought there was another problem but now I see that it is a forum behavior I don't understand and maybe you could help me understand: You mentioned the orange icons and I looked at those but they were appearing for a great number of threads (at least the entire first page of results). Wolfies code made everything bold but now I see this is inline with the forum behavior. However it seems to me that the appearance of the orange icons should match the threads you see when you click "new content" which was about 10 total at the time of testing. Hundreds of threads were marked with the orange icons. Why the difference?

Alexa isn't a search engine. Alexa has no way to directly measure the traffic any given website has. Their methodology is to take very sparse data they get from their toolbar (although someone here said they are using other sources and I'd like to know what they are) and create heavily biased ranking from that data. It is for the most part useless. Only a ranking system like Quantcast that has actual traffic numbers has any legitimacy, but they rely on individual websites to install their tracking code. Alexa is not magic and they don't know actual traffic numbers for websites.

It would be helpful in the members tab, left column, to have a quick search field for members. Since I am having to update member titles manually, it would greatly improve the speed of my task to be able to do a quick search from the page I am currently on.

Admin set member titles in vbulletin were not migrated to the IPB board. I am willing to update these manually but I think this is something you will want to fix. *****Found another thing - all of my old PM messages were marked as new in IPB. Many of the PM messages were associated with "deleted member" when the member that sent them was imported into IPB fine.

Well I tried that and it threw everything out of whack. That's not quite the answer but it seems close.

True dat. Alexas ranking methodology makes it pretty useless.

This is in no way an official outlet for this kind of info and this certainly could end up being a premature estimate, but based on discussions with support staff about bugs I have found that will be addressed in 3.02 - I think we are looking at 2 to 3 weeks.

One of the most important issues facing Vbulletin forum owners thinking about switching to IPB is the reaction from the users. If the user experience changes too much, we could really upset our user base. I am happy to report that since going live with my IPB conversion yesterday, I have had a lot of good feedback on the switch. However, there is one feature that many of my users, and myself, are missing from Vbulletin: in Vbulletin when a user visits the site, all threads that have new posts since the users last visit are highlighted in bold in the forum view. This is a great feature and my users really liked it. I'm hoping that IPB will consider implementing this to ease the transition from Vbulletin to IPB.

Thanks!

Sorry for the poor placement of this post but I just did a conversion from VB to IPB and I need some quick answers while I get all the settings where they should be. How do I disable forum registration?

I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you on this one. There are times when it makes sense to have links open in the same window (like navigating through one website), and times when it clearly makes sense to open links in a new window (like when referencing resources external to the current website). As a user I get pretty annoyed when the webmaster of a site has not applied a little common sense to the situation and has all links opening in the same window. I don't want to have to discover that the behavior is not what I expected and then go back and adjust my clicking to match a more sensical browsing paradigm. Further, for website owners who are providing content and services for free to users, dictating the link type to control the user experience to a small degree is certainly the right of the site owner, and is of the smallest imposition on the user (if at all). You should also realize that a great number of Internet users have a very low level of computer literacy and many would not know how to open links in new windows manually.

I think the template is excellent and I have been running big boards for many years. If you read about new paradigms in web design, you will find that having more blank space is considered a good way to improve the user experience. Bfarber is right, the average user enjoys a less cluttered experience.

Well done guys!

Yes, please no stock corporate photography :barf: :D

I'd be happy with a built in browser detection script that warns people about the limitations of IE6 and suggests they use Firefox. I know that a certain percentage of IE6 users are simply non-computer savvy people that have the ability to install a different browser but just don't know any better. And if they don't want to use a different browser (or can't), at least we have done our due diligence as webmasters by warning them prior to their session on the website.

More key Vbulletin staff have flown the coop, and long time staff that have left are starting to leak info that hints at what a nightmare it is turning into over there. Meltdown in 3.......2.........

I'm not saying its a bad idea to have public beta tests. However to have a public beta test on a server that you know would likely cause performance issues is not a good idea and that was what I was referring to. Gotta put your best foot forward at all times and sharing resources in this case had some negative effects that could have turned off future customers. And yes, its fine now :) BTW I bought the suite today to start initial testing for future projects. Probably wouldn't have happened if there were still doubts about performance.

As some business related feedback - I would strongly urge you not to make the mistake of allowing these performance issues to linger in a public setting. I was beginning to conclude that maybe IPB was not fast, robust product that Vbulletin is, and I was second guessing my decision to move my sites to IPB. Fast now though, and I am relieved about that :)

I've seen this extensively through the sites I manage regardless of the software package used. I think the biggest problem is that the confirmation emails go into users spam folders in their email account. When you are making that mod, be sure to add in gigantic font "CHECK YOUR SPAM FOLDERS FOR THE CONFIRMATION EMAIL!!!! :)

I think the problem with view new content is how it's searching. When I click that I get the following: There are 33977 new entries Now, what exactly is the definition of "new content" here? There certainly haven't been 33,977 new threads etc since I was on the site last night.

There are definitely some performance issues here. Like these guys said, view new content takes very long to load. Just getting this reply form took over 20 seconds to load just now. I've been seeing this since rc2 was installed.

A whole range of issues. The product itself has had little meaningful development for the last couple of years. The photo gallery and groups features have very poor integration with the forum. Blog product is widely criticized for many faults. Search functionality really doesnt work at all for very large forums. VB is very difficult to integrate with third party applications and VB will not reveal if it has any plans for a product like IPB's converge. There is no product roadmap that details what the future holds for development and features. There is no first party or third party professional developers network for VB making professional, business level support difficult or impossible to find. What we do know is that the price of VB is going up (again), long time VB developers are leaving the company, and customer complaints are being dealt with very harshly in the forums. There is more, but thats what I came up with off the top of my head.

Vbulletin has moved all customer feedback threads to a non-public forum so I can't link any threads. But let me tell you what's going on in that private forum - VB users are very angry and are becoming more and more vocal about it. VB staff are becoming very heavy-handed in moderating that forum. Essentially, dissent is no longer tolerated and constructive discussions about customer needs are a thing of the past. So IPB - keep it up with the great communication, friendly customer support, and great product offerings and you may just see a mass-exodus to your products.