Important News!!

I remember as mods/cmods/admins etc, we had access to the Responsive Site before and after users had access to it (I think anyway, it was many years ago)….it was beyond bad. Good intentions, & Dav had the right idea to create a single site that adapted itself to the format of the device being used, and there were some great ideas thrown around regards the sidebar etc, but the execution was abysmally bad (far worse than what we currently have now in this customized Vanilla if you can believe it.) Many of us were delighted it was canned, it was reminiscent of a Geocities thing from back when.

“It is notable how a good chunk of complaints about Boards on this thread are about moderation”

As I’m one of those people who complained- let me respond.

Moderation is only 1/2 the story. The most important aspect of any forum is its charter - that dictates what happens and what doesn’t.
moderators are merely there to then implement the rules of the charter and to guide people on the appropriate behaviour for that forum.

I remember CA/IMHO forum being created - from of all things, After Hours -I was scratching my head at the time asking what and why? To a degree I still am.

My own view is CA is set fail time and time again- probably one of the key reasons is that it allows threads to go on and on and on, long after a particular event has happened. These threads never end well and are way past their sell by date - they become a cesspit of fighting and circular arguments repeated ad nauseam

Encouraging debate and more importantly dialogue is wonderful - but given the contentious topics normally debated, we can set a clock as to when a new thread will start to go off the rails.

Since a “radical” solution has been implemented in terms of hands off modding, (which may not be as bad as it sounds) - I would also advocate that mods decide when the “shitshow” is just getting too much and it’s time for all to move on- and shut the thread. Reddit users drop topics all the time - everyday brings new topics for digestion -

Since analogies are apparently allowed now, maybe CA forum can move from mind numbing navel gazing prog rock to short sharp to the point punk - I think it’s worth a try.

If I'm remembering it correctly (it was three years ago), we landed on Vanilla in a very stock fashion. So very little remained of what had proven so successful before, from Followed Threads/Forums, to the site layout, basic navigation, and so on….it was really, really, bad. To add to that, I think Mods lost a ton of functionality too, reporting posts system got completely borked, and so on.

I avoided CA like the plague before, even though I have an interest in politics/CA. Now I'll continue to ignore it. Works for me

I also truly don't understand the statement that if they hadn't migrated to a new website the existing website would have gone offline.

The old website worked amazingly well on both desktop and mobile. What could possibly force a migration to a new platform?

Indeed- there are actually few if any, true Trump fans on boards - it’s a myth created by certain posters to drown out any criticisms of the pathetic Democrats and their feeble efforts of a presidential campaign last summer.
In my experience of say the Trump thread, whilst it might appear a noble cause to highlight the daily idiocy of the current regime, there’s no real debate around impact, or what “should” be happening or focusing on the Democrats and what they should be doing.

Any half-wit can laugh and point fingers at MAGA- but that’s not debate or the creation of new ideas and concepts or dialogue - it’s just mindless news dumping

From my understanding of it, we had a hugely spaghettified vBulletin codebase, tweaked, reworked, adapted, year after year after year. Yes it worked extremely well, and did exactly what was needed of it, but when it came time to add an update or fix into that spaghettified code, it had the unintended consequence of breaking things as a result. Sound familiar?

Couple that with scaling back of staff, and losing our own developers, there was no choice but to move. A cloud based solution fit the bill, but given how customised the pre-Vanilla site was, and how much functionality we depended upon, it's clear that Vanilla wasn't a good fit for us.

They no longer had the resources to operate the old site. I remember that. But then why choose to implement a heavily customized version with even less resources. Never made sense.

I assume some technical resources over promised and under delivered. But that was obvious very quickly. They should have pulled the plug and re thought it. Instead they dug deeper.

Ask yourself then, who wanted the years worth of customisations that followed the move to Vanilla, and why did HQ deem it necessary to pursue them?

Plus I'm pretty sure things like security updates etc would no longer be a thing etc. However the choice of vanilla was entirely wrong IMHO and now continued support for the platform relies on the hosts staying operational. No updates happen with the community version.

They stubbornly refused to shed all the old obsolete data. Classic Digital hoarding. They made a chain and ball for themselves.

It seemed to be the customisation rather than vanilla imo. But tbh I've no idea. They were always very uninformative about what was going on.