ROLL IT BACK

Question - is this the worst "upgrade" you've ever seen on a website?

Geuinely cant think of a worse one.

I wouldn't imagine it's too easy to roll back. We've had a fair few changes over the years but I would (begrudgingly) eventually get used to the new site if the full functionality was there. Like when I want to go to the most recent post, but it just brings me to the start of the thread. Or no differentiation between stickys and threads

There's a lot of niggly bits that make the experience miserable and I hope they get sorted in due time

Let me preface this by saying that I am posting my opinion rather than as site admin. It's fair to say that we are all struggling with the new forum software until changes have been made - mods and admin as well as regular users. And I do think that Niamh and Mark have tried to be as transparent as possible with where areas of focus are right now, namely site speed and navigation. vBulletin -> Vanilla was never going to be a like for like migration in all areas, particularly with 20 years worth of content, vBulletin hacks and so on. I imagine that once core issues have been sorted, issues that are more shopfront facing and visible to the user will be addressed. But I understand that it can be frustrating when what's being worked with under the bonnet isn't always immediately visible.

For those saying, "roll it back", "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and so on, I do think there is an element of rose tinted glasses or convenient ignoring of the truth going on, depending on how you look at it. To the best of my technical knowledge in this area, vBulletin, or at least the revision used by boards, was never designed for the amount of traffic Boards received. Nor the size of the threads that endured on the site. Multiple hacks were incorporated into the site over the years to implement certain functionality, to address database issues and so on. The software as it stood was most definitely broke in that it had reached its capacity, and people are forgetting the myriad of 503 errors, freezes, and so on. My personal opinion is that an upgrade to the forum software wasn't just necessary, but long overdue, and that Boards simply wouldn't have been able to continue in any reasonable capacity on its existing platform.

That's not an argument that the site as it is right now is something I'd wish to stay in place, but I do believe it's a far more stable platform to build on than the previous, outdated, hacked together vBulletin platform, and I think that with some time and patience, the functionality that we all want can be brought back in a far more stable form. Again, personal opinion rather than any great insight into what's happening behind the scenes, but I imagine that once things have settled with the new platform, development time can actually be pointed towards improving the user experience, rather than almost all development time put towards keeping the site up and running, which I believe was the case in the past.

Just my 0.02c...

There are some issues with that comment. Boards traffic is way way down on its heyday of 2010/11, so it was not traffic issues. Granted the database is bigger than ever before but a much much simpler solution would have been to archive threads that have seen no action in say 5 years. I don't know why that wasn't the road taken but that's somewhat besides the point. The key point is that the migration has been a complete and utter shambles. The team were obviously not at all ready for it.

You might think that's easy for me to say, captain of infinite wisdom hiding behind the keyboard but at the moment at work in managing a technical transition too. Failure is not an option in any sense. We must embed the new technology and it cannot result in downtime or lost data. That's why it's a parallel project, executed on the new system and copied to the old at the end of the day. Yes, we don't see the productivity gains all immediately, in fact it's probably negative and expensive but when the system is mature and we are comfortable we will drop the evening copy. As I said failure is not an option.

Traffic is critical for this site to survive as a business and the move is killing it. I cannot for the life of me understand why this transition was carried out in such a half baked careless manner - since the staffs jobs depend on it being a success. It was obvious to everyone, that while a lot of effort had gone into the template, it wasn't in the ballpark of being ready, it's an alpha stage release.

That said, those hoping for a roll back are not going to get it, it's vanilla or bust at this stage.

Definitely can't see a rollback happening for the reasons outlined in @Tokyo's post above. Also because it would result in the loss of all data from the Vanilla version and I couldn't see a "reverse migration" being done for those. I'm guessing that migrating to a supported version of vBulletin was probably not possible due to the amount of hacks and mods made to it over the years.

I don't know the ins and outs of this but I feel it could have been handled better. I don't understand why it wasn't possible to beta test the new environment before going live because the state it came back in had definitely left a sour taste in many people's mouths. As did the long downtime to migrate it (was it not possible to take a live snapshot followed by an incremental sync during downtime?). Even the much-hated responsive site didn't produce such a serious reaction, although in fairness it wasn't mandatory either.

90% of the data since the migration has been about complaining about the migration.

They really should go live with a parallel vbulletin old.boards.ie while they fix this.

And when it's actually ready then kill the old site.

It literally says Admin under their name. A lot of people's complaints re speed and not being able find things seem very odd as I've no speed issues and don't find it difficult to find anything now that I know where the soccer forum is. Is it down to the browsers people are using? I'm on chrome on mobile and find it no better or worse than the old site for speed.

My only gripes are similar to an above post mentioning no differentiation between sticky and threads. No name of user and last post time in a thread. No email updates for threads, as far as I can see.

You have to click on profile and then go there to find out whether a poster is what they claim to be.

Nor on mine

Thanks. I thought that I must be blind :)

You "literally" should make sure you're right without having a go at other people 😆

^^ I think we're getting hung up on the wrong thing here :) Mobile site shows user titles, but it seems that the custom layout for the desktop site doesn't yet.

They seriously should have just taken their time and programmed their own software their own way rather than trying to hack another forum software to work the way they want it to work - they complained about vbulletin being an issue but that was surely down to all the custom modifications they made to it and they are doing exactly the same thing now

If a software does not fulfill you requirements out of the box with future upgrades then you write your own code

I could have written the base code for what Boards "did" in the space of a few weeks - we're not talking rocket science when it comes to forum code, it's a bit of html, a bit of css, a bit of js and some DB optimisation

I was looking at the business plans for Vanilla - nearly 700 euro a month and we end up with this crap after 2 weeks and no end in sight

It is absolutely unexplainable how there are still no drop down menus on the desktop site, and still no easy way to access my forums (the 10-15 forums that a user might use on a daily basis) on the mobile site, over a week after going live and following a few hours of down-time the other day

Not to pile on the weight the staff are no doubt feeling right now (God help them!), but I think it's so very telling that ten years ago nearly to the day, the site was like a Rolls Royce compared to what it is now - https://web.archive.org/web/20110721122309/http://www.boards.ie/ I really miss that version of the site, it was damned near perfect for what Boards aspired to be. Efficient use of space, nice delineation, functional, intuitive, was easy to explore and discover new communities, and was in general just a pleasant place to visit.

There's no doubt in my mind that everyone behind the scenes is putting their heart and soul into this migration, but to be fair to all (staff, volunteers, and users), it's been an unmitigated disaster. It's head scratching how the green light for the migration was given. I've been around Boards to see several site updates....they're never received well, usually because people don't like change. This is way, way, way beyond merely change though....the site actually shouldn't be live right now it's that bad. We seem to have lost some defining features of what made Boards unique, and the site is very very broken at the moment, & traffic seems to have plummeted as a result, there's the usual acres of empty/wasted space we see with some 'contemporary' site designs, scrolling has increased massively, clicking seems to have increased significantly, and on the whole, the site is far too much effort to be bothered to try and use. It's definitely not, a pleasant place to visit today.

It could improve with time, bugs squashed, problems resolved, tweaks made here and there....if the site survives the prolonged periods with such reduced traffic, reduced function, and such reduced relevancy. I can already see the seeds of some of the improvements, tagging users in posts, embedding media, and so forth. I feel though that the next 6-12+ months will be spent chasing a version of the site I was able to use 3 weeks ago, with a handful of modern updates tacked on. Even at that, personally I've hated the look of the Talk-To forums for years, and now that the whole site looks like them, I'm not confident about liking the eventual finished result. My time here, like many at the moment, has reduced significantly, and that doesn't look to change any time soon.

The calls for the site to be rolled back to its previous incarnation....yeah, that's never going to happen, ever. Boards seems to have had major, major struggles with bringing itself up to date...remember the previous 'responsive' site? Another absolute disaster, but at the very least it went live alongside a legacy version of the site. Thankfully, that exposed enough shortcomings that it was eventually pulled. Not the case this time unfortunately, and we're stuck with this version now I feel. I suppose I'm just at a loss as to how Vanilla managed to convince Boards management this was the way to go.... Yes there's improvements coming, but with a single developer at the helm (can you imagine being that person?), the workload is unrealistic for the site of this size. Somebody somewhere made a colossal mistake in green lighting this mess, and a site that tens of thousands of people cherish every day of the week, seems to have gone down the toilet as a result.

Is it just me or do spam threads seem to be a lot more prevalent on this platform? Counterfeit money yesterday, some sort of moving company today...

Is any Admin or anyone actually giving updates on what the plan is or reading this thread?

They said the site was going down for an hour the other night to restore the my forums and still no sign of them. If this goes on much longer the site won’t recover. People will find other forums and won’t return.

honestly, using it less now than ever

poor migration, hiccups can always allow but this......

How is there not a "My Forums" option? Old boards had it, Reddit has all the subs you follow at the top of the page, Twitter has the people you follow. Why go through 3 or 4 pages to get a forum you post on?