touch site gone in 3-6 months

95% of our tech team's time is being spent working on the feedback received on the beta test so far. But there are only 3 of them and they're not miracle workers.

I've tried explaining this before, but haven't done a good enough job obviously. So I'll do my best again to break down what's happening and why.

1) we need to be rid of VBulletin. It hasn't been fit for purpose for years. The Talk To forums and touch. no longer run on it thankfully. The rest of the site has to be moved away from it.

2) we have neither the time, money nor man-power to run 2 separate sites and dedicated apps. There are 3 developers and a sys admin in house to manage the technical needs of one of the biggest sites in this country.

3) responsive websites are the perfect solution to where the internet is right now - you have one site that figures out what kind of device you're using and serves you the appropriate layout. Mobile traffic is now more than half of Boards total - it was only about 30-35% this time last year.

4) not being tied to VBulletin means that changes take days instead of weeks to implement. Not having what currently amounts to 3 sites (plus apps) running in parallel means that the team's workload is DRASTICALLY reduced in terms of maintenance, changes and tweaks.

5) to the people who think we're just doing this for the craic - you are being big silly heads I really don't think I need to expand on this, do I?

The most difficult thing in the online world to do, it seems, is change a website. You get almost universal hatred and criticism from the existing community of members who never, ever want anything to change. You can't get accurate feedback from the people you're hoping to attract because they cannot figure out the current site as it is and don't know how to give feedback. I would like to think that Boards has always done its best to give people what they want - we've never shied away from criticism or feedback and when there's an overwhelming majority of people looking for something to be changed, we do it. Making this move means we're going to be able to do it a LOT sooner. To the multitudes saying "ain't broke - don't fix" have no idea what they're talking about I'm afraid. They have neither the statistics nor the thousands of emails a year nor the feedback from people we want to do business with about how difficult our site is to use. Like it or not, we want and need more members and making the site more friendly to new people is how we do that.

We've thankfully had a lot of useful and detailed over the last few months which is why things have gone quiet on the Responsive Site Testing forum, the stuff's been read, sorted and prioritised and is being worked on. When there's a major update pushed, there'll be news about it there and the change notes listed and the process will be repeated. It's an iterative process, it takes time and above all your help (which you all do, please don't think we don't appreciate that).

You can turn sigs off any time...

But no, it's a horrible interface for a wide screen monitor.

This site is nothing without the users, and if so many of us want the touch site to stay, then that should happen.

IMO the apps and the beta sites are ****e.