[Springframework-developer] Forum Software Upgrade from phpBB to vBulletin

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

I'm pleased to announce that we've changed forum software from phpBB to 
vBulletin.

While phpBB has served us decently well over the last year, we've also 
had a number of issues with it. vBulletin has a better user feature set, 
and behind the scenes, a much better management experience. Importantly, 
it also has a very clean import path from phpBB, preserving all existing 
users and posts, the latter being especially critical as the thousands 
of existing posts are an invaluable resource.

All existing posts should have come across without issues. The one 
exception is that any post that included (such as in a code sample) the 
standard XML escape sequence of &lt; which stands for '<' will in the 
imported version just have a '<'. There should be no cases or next to 
none cases of this though.

Note that any threads you were subscribed to previously (either because 
you explicitly subscribed to them, or because you checked the 
appropriate check-box when creating a thread) will need to be subscribed 
to again.

All user accounts should have imported successfully. Note that any user 
signatures containing quotes in them will need light editing, as " came 
across as \".

Be aware that as opposed to the old phpBB vehaviour, when displaying 
threads in a forum vBulletin defaults to only the last month's worth. 
Another value (e.g. all posts) may be easily specified via the dropdown 
at the bottom of the thread listing.

Expect the look and feel (theme) of the site to change over the next few 
weeks. Due to issues with phpBB it was considered important to make this 
switch now, before secondary aspects such as a final look and feel were 
fully done.

Working against the limitation that existing posts must not be lost, it 
will be our goal on an ongoing basis to continue to enhance the user 
experience on the forums. This means we will in the future further 
enhance the feature set with plugins to vBulletin, new versions of 
vBulletin, or even a move to other software where that makes sense and a 
clean conversion is possible.

Regards,
Colin
__________________
Colin Sampaleanu
Interface21 - Spring Training, Consulting, and Support, "From the Source"
http://www.springframework.com