Over 30 is an old fart?

I think the last thing the "journos" that write the dross filling the front page is comments on the terrible job they are doing.

Headline on mobile version: Mariah Carey didn't know about Nick Cannon's Baby

Headline on desktop version: Mariah Carey knew about Nick Cannon's third baby before he told her

https://vanillaforums.org/discussions - Vanilla

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/foru...etin-5-connect - vBulletin

I decided to look after not viewing it in a long long time but ouch!

http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/new...in-six-months/

So are we on the new software now?

No. They did a test migration, found some errors and intend to address those on the exported database, then suspend the forum again to do it again - but for real.

I think they'd be mad to do it before the new year though.

So the forum was down for 3 days for nothing... wow

I doubt they'd just do it once and hope it all worked!

They needed to stop anything being added to the database while doing an entire export (or maybe a few exports - and can you imagine the size of the data?) and then seeing if all the data was intact and able to be imported into the new software.

What they've done so far is logical as the copied database can now be played with, but I wouldn't expect anything to be risked over Christmas for blatantly obvious reasons.

And that article says "via Gamespot", so a big site has just copied someone else's work(!)

The Friends obsession is just insane.

The main site is just awful. It's been downhill for some time now and I use it less and less. The worst I saw was "7 Celebrities Who Look Like Pokemon" about three months ago. That's not journalism.

The latest thing seems to be just quoting a selection of tweets and passing it off as news.

Awful.

the search is still broken for me but at least not much has changed.

I'm sure, based on the description of the new software, they'll be going over to Vanilla. Check out The Sims Forums for an idea of how it works. It's actually not too bad but certainly aimed at a younger audience (in the features at least) than those that tend to visit these forums.

http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/

It was NOT down for three days for me and it was not down for nothing it was down to prepare for a later complete update of the forums, I thought that had been made clear

No it wasn't down, it was in read only mode. Nobody had posted since the 14th.

IPS is another option. That seems to have become quite popular recently with forums that want to move closer to the social media model.

In any case, I can understand the move from vBulletin. 4 is fine, but 5 is an utter abomination. And one would presume there will come a time when 4 is no longer supported...

No the Forums were read only whilst they started doing some things in the background that we cannot see yet as it has not been completed.

The no spaces in usernames thing is because one of the new features is to address people using @ (i.e., if you put @JAS84 in a post, I think I'd be notified that I was mentioned?). In your case, it would link to James, not James J. I would guess they'd use underscores instead, though DS Forum Support has said that anyone with a space in their current name will be offered a full name change if you want one.

Alternatehistory.com allows spaces in usernames and the @ thing still works. Im called "Lemon flavoured" there and it works fine. When you start typing say "@Lem" it then gives ypu a drop down of usernames that start like that.

That's because nothing has changed, we are still on the old forum software (see previous posts).

I'm guessing as part of the cost savings that were mentioned, they are doing away with paying for a vBulletin license and going with the open source self-hosted version of Vanilla which is free. To be honest, if that is the case then it's a good move as Vanilla is already a lot more modern than the current version of VB that they are using. Why pay to upgrade VB at a cost when you can get the same functionality elsewhere for free? If it means we don't have to deal with those ghastly adverts on the mobile version, I'm all for it!

Do you honestly think they're going to launch a new forum without advertising on every platform you can view it on?

It's precisely the reason they didn't allow support of Tapatalk, which would have made this forum far easier to use - but had no ads.

Of course people use Ad Blockers, so that has been a big problem too.

All we can hope is the ads are less intrusive and we no longer get any malware, or nasty mobile pop-ups/slide-ups and so on.

Nick who?

Nick Cannon it says so. Cannon and Ball?

Rock on!

There needs to be actual content instead of clickbait for a comments system to work.