ANNOUNCEMENT: New Board Coming Soon!

[Elleth Faewen]

To all at ADBB,

I am very happy to announce that ADBB is moving on up to powerful new board software. We will be changing from phpbb to vBulletin. VBulletin is advanced bulletin board software that adds stability, flexibility, and a lot of new features.

The stability is a big one as the board has been down a few times due to people hacking phpbb and due to the size of ADBB and the limitations in phpbb. We anticipate a dramatic decrease in down-time.

Some of the key features of vBulletin include

Threads

• Thread display options - sort by, sort order, from date
• Thread and forum subscription with e-mail notification
• Thread preview on mouse-over
• Printer Friendly versions on threads
• Email page to a friend option
• Similar Threads displayed on all thread views

Posts

• WYSIWYG editor (What you see is what you get)
• Quick reply
• Post rating
• User reputation
• Post Reporting - report posts to moderators

Members

• Member Search
• Member List
• Buddy List
• Member Birthdays shown on Forum home

General

• Calendar
• Calendar event reminders for subscribed events
• Pop-up auto-refreshing buddylist with ICQ-style alerts when new buddies come online
• Paid Subscriptions (PayPal, WorldPay, NOCHEX and Authorize.net)
• Editable FAQ
• Context sensitive help throughout the adminCP

Also, there are a lot of features that are already in phpbb, but vBulletin just does them a little better.

If you would like to get an idea of how vBulletin works before we make the change, visit the vbulletin forums at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/.

A new chat system will go live with the new board that will be available to everyone. To help support the new board, we will also be making features available to subscribers/donators such as an image gallery, private forums, boot camp, etc. Some features will be available immediately, while some will come soon after the upgrade.

When the board moves, all our posts will move with it, but we will lose the existing private messages.

If you have any private messages you want to keep, I recommend you save them now.

Dawn designed the look for the new board, and I think you will like it a lot.

Our goal is to move to the new board in July. We currently have moderators and board volunteers helping shake out the bugs as we plan the move.

To move the amount of data we have and resetup everything will mean approximately one day of down-time, then we will be up and running on the new board! I anticipate approximately one week of clean-up after the new board is up before we have everything configured back the way we want it. Some things that we will be working on are user groups, rankings, announcements, and other things that have to be recreated by hand.

You may notice some small changes here as we prepare, such as changing group names to prevent duplicates during the move. We are also changing all announcements to stickies as they do not translate to the new board.

I am very excited about the change, and I think you will like it a lot.

Post any questions you have here and I will do my best to answer them.

[spirittalker]

:joy :joy :joy You guys let me know if you need help. K? I never figured out how to volunteer. urplequ:

[Elleth Faewen]

If you want to volunteer, just send a PM to any of the admins. Right now, that is me, Dawn, or Betty.

Thank you!