We have begun experimenting with the possibility of converting the forum to a new Content Management System and database. I don't have an estimate of when we would attempt a full-scale conversion.
Assuming we can make this work, what I think will happen is this:
- The forum will be copied to a new location (still on SF Fandom)
- We'll turn off this forum
- We'll turn on the new forum
- We'll send an email to all active members
- We'll wait and see what happens
What happens behind the scenes is a bit more technical. I've already imported a copy of the database once. Ran into a few problems but the conversion seemed to go mostly well.
But then when I tried to load the important forum in my browser it looked like gibberish.
So why would we do this? Well, that's complicated. But for security reasons I am reluctant to reinstall Vbulletin's "Install" directory, which you need for upgrades. Also, I'm not sure I want to pay for another Vbulletin license. Call me cheap, but there are so many pay-as-you-go services now that trying to pay for every bit of software we use would be prohibitively expensive. We use as much open source code as we can.
And SF-Fandom is not the only Vbulletin forum we need to upgrade. It's the largest and I believe if we can do this migration successfully then we can do the others.
People may not be happy with the default templates. We will spend some time testing a new forum once it's up and running. I'll have to give the moderators time to play with it.
The worst-case scenario is that we'll turn on the new forum, everyone will hate it, and we'll just come back here. This forum won't be deleted until we're sure people are using the new one without much trouble.