Lets face it, HC's forums are pretty old technology. They are sturdy, but they are ancient lol. I'd like to announce that we will be getting a new forum software, called Xenforo. Its very nice, and has TONS of cool features. I have been messing around with a demo that we have about three more days to play with, I have skinned it, though when you look at it, don't be alarmed. Many of the elements are not quite lined up correctly, and a lot of the solid browns and greys you see are not there to stay. The stock colors were blues and whites, so I simply swapped them out for more theme matching colors. They will be replaced with better colors, textures, and things to make them appear even cooler than our forums do now. The only thing I have put some serious work in to is the "in thread" areas, so click on a thread and check it out. Though, quote boxes and a few other things are still not skinned. Tell me what you think! And be sure to try out some of the new features, including the profile comments, like system, PM system (which I find really cool) etc... Here is the link: http://Demo.xenforo.com/?d=89c4a4eeba73c5a4
Outdated or not the forum itself is fairly solid. I'd be more worried about our connection issues first.
As the one who introduced Xenforo, I will just say, if HC wants to move forward and expand in the way that Toko envisions, then Xenforo is really the route to go. Very customizable, tons of support from Xenforo themselves on their forums, and tons of add ons. Two of the most prominent communities on the internet, IGN and theforce.net, have switched the Xenforo. And looking at the demo, even though Toko has only been working on it for about 24 hours almost, it looks really good. It also runs much faster than any forum software I've ever used and the features are unparalleld.
I'm with RD. At present the forums themselves aren't broken and thus don't need fixing. I'd rather be 100% certain that the site will be reliably accessible before we work on aesthetics.
The site is stable, and I have not had these connection issues you guys have spoken of. I haven't had these two hour long down times, and have been able to access HC perfectly ever since moving to the new host. If it does happen now and then, its not something that is controllable by us, and it is on the server end. Our host is one of the best out there for reliability, and there isn't much better that we can do. honestly, HC is perfectly stable, and the forums will continue to be accessible. Switching forum software has nothing to do with server stability, so why let it hinder us improving what we have?
Well, as long as Adad can still find his way around the coding, I guess I have no reason to protest. If he can't, though, it's something else.
Adad can code in pretty much any forum software there is, its all built on similar foundations. So yeah, don't worry about that!
From time to time Firefox gives an error that it can't connect to the server. Just the generic Firefox error, really.
If it's not a 503 or database error then it may be on your end and not the site's. Things happen from time to time but in a month I've never seen the site go down once. Also I really think that everyone should test the demo board out to get the feel for it and check out some of the cool features it has. I've been playing around with it for a few weeks actually and have used it on other forums and it's really fantastic. IMO superior to VB, and created by former VB employees. Who VB is now essentially copying with 5.0.
Well, it's been a few months since Xenforo was introduced, and I think it's going really well so far. There haven't been any real snags, and it's all running very nicely. It's clean, it's filled with features to exploit, and it's much faster and easier to use. Thanks again for switching us, Toko. :)
