Hello Posters and Readers of the Official City of Heroes Message Forums!
We have some exciting news for the Official CoH Forums Were Upgrading! Were planning on migrating the current forums to a spiffy new vBulletin platform in the near future.
History
The current forums are a version of Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) software that we have been using since City of Heroes launched back in 2004. Recently, we had some issues come up with the UBB forums that required a significant amount of back end work (stuff on the server side). When we considered doing that work, we also realized that it would be a similar amount of work to make a change to a new forum software platform. When we evaluated some of the many great forum platforms out there on the market, we decided to make a change and settled on vBulletin.
The New Platform
I wont extol the virtues of vBulletin, but suffice to say they should be a nice change for us and give us new features as well as improve overall forum performance. NCsoft recently migrated the Dungeon Runners game forums to vBulletin (they were our guinea pig oink!) If you want to check out their implementation, take a look here.
Migration Process and Beta
Were still doing the back end server work to prepare for this migration. This includes
[*] Importing all data to the new platform yes, all your posts, private messages and everything should carry over to the new forums.[*] Optimizations to our database[*] Purging old, unnecessary threads[*] Purging old names or accounts who havent posted in over 3 years (this also frees up names that may be desirable as forum handles)[/list]We want to apologize for the recent poor performance of the current UBB forums. Part of the reason for that has been things we've been doing on the server to prepare for this migration. So, please pardon the dust while were under construction!
Our plan also includes a beta time frame. This will have the vBulletin boards (and their current import of data from the UBB forums) available to the public. This will allow everyone to check out the vBulletin version of the forums and give feedback on their implementation and get comfortable with them. While both version of the forums are available (the current UBB forums and the new beta version on vBulletin) none of your posts on vBulletin will be saved, so posting there will just be to check it out. If everything goes smoothly, we should be announcing the beta vBulletin forums for you all to look at in the near future.
When we do the transition the UBB forums will disappear and be replaced with the new vBulletin forums with all the posts and data carried right over like we were on a vBulletin platform the whole time.
To discuss this announcement, please join us here.
Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager
If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.
Hello Posters and Readers of the Official City of Heroes Message Forums!
We have some exciting news for the Official CoH Forums Were Upgrading! Were planning on migrating the current forums to a spiffy new vBulletin platform in the near future.
History
The current forums are a version of Ultimate Bulletin Board (UBB) software that we have been using since City of Heroes launched back in 2004. Recently, we had some issues come up with the UBB forums that required a significant amount of back end work (stuff on the server side). When we considered doing that work, we also realized that it would be a similar amount of work to make a change to a new forum software platform. When we evaluated some of the many great forum platforms out there on the market, we decided to make a change and settled on vBulletin.
The New Platform
I wont extol the virtues of vBulletin, but suffice to say they should be a nice change for us and give us new features as well as improve overall forum performance. NCsoft recently migrated the Dungeon Runners game forums to vBulletin (they were our guinea pig oink!) If you want to check out their implementation, take a look here.
Migration Process and Beta
Were still doing the back end server work to prepare for this migration. This includes
[*] Importing all data to the new platform yes, all your posts, private messages and everything should carry over to the new forums.[*] Optimizations to our database[*] Purging old, unnecessary threads[*] Purging old names or accounts who havent posted in over 3 years (this also frees up names that may be desirable as forum handles)[/list]We want to apologize for the recent poor performance of the current UBB forums. Part of the reason for that has been things we've been doing on the server to prepare for this migration. So, please pardon the dust while were under construction!
Our plan also includes a beta time frame. This will have the vBulletin boards (and their current import of data from the UBB forums) available to the public. This will allow everyone to check out the vBulletin version of the forums and give feedback on their implementation and get comfortable with them. While both version of the forums are available (the current UBB forums and the new beta version on vBulletin) none of your posts on vBulletin will be saved, so posting there will just be to check it out. If everything goes smoothly, we should be announcing the beta vBulletin forums for you all to look at in the near future.
When we do the transition the UBB forums will disappear and be replaced with the new vBulletin forums with all the posts and data carried right over like we were on a vBulletin platform the whole time.
To discuss this announcement, please join us here.
Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager
If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.