If you're walking on egg shells with this message board now, then brace yourselves for a disaster like the one that shut this site down in 2003. The point of upgrading is to keep the site stable and safe from problems like that. The new versions run faster and smoother, so in a sense you'd be making your lives easier in controlling this forum.

And secondly, if a problem does come and you are stuck on an out-dated version, it will be difficult to get support to fix it, which is why vBulletin recommends staying current. Just another thought. Like I've said before I'm not here to rock the boat over but just open a discussion on a smart idea.


RUgreek

Uh, no one's walking on eggshells. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. John's the only one that does anything to control the servers, etc.

It's John's board. John does what he wants. If you're so inclined, i'm sure he wouldn't be adverse to a nice donation to compensate him for his time and the money involved in running the servers that support GC :)

And just say no to avatars! The huge sigs are big enough, as well as annoying (and sometimes inappropriate) pictures. We don't need more junk on the screen :)

Why are you saying it's not broke? Do you think the only difference between older versions and newer version of vbulleting is avatars?

And if you don't want avatars, you can always disable that option.

-Rudey

I'm saying that it's not broke b/c we haven't had much in the way of problems.

I mentioned the avatars thing b/c that's what so many people have brought up when this has been talked about before.

John's been fully aware of the new version for awhile now, it's been mentioned to him before, he's talked about it with people, etc. Whatever his reasons for not upgrading, they're his reasons, and it's his site :)

Relax honey, I'm not jerking off to the fantasy of avatars. As I stated before, it has NOTHING to do with the upgrade since it's a feature already part of this version. Version 3 has a ton of cool features and SAVES a lot of time and bandwith. Just don't get confused over the pros and cons of switching. The downside, yes, is potentially new problems and more headaches if the upgrade goes haywire. This is just an idea, sheesh.

I love this whole it's John's board and he does what he wants with it motto. While I respect this person without ever conversing, I think a better way to share a community is by making the members feel they have a right to speak up and contribute as well. If he ever asked me for money, I'd contribute, so don't get too high and mighty on that. I was here from the start and I'm not complaining about how this site is run.

I agree with Rudey, this site is broken and could definitely use a facelift. But if it's been discussed privately and a decision has been made final, then that's cool. :cool:


RUgreek

GC will definitely be moving up to vBulletin version 3. It has a number of new and improved features. I've been planning for this to happen in the spring of this year - so sometime within the next few months. GC is currently using the most recent version of vB2 which was released in January.

Prior to upgrading to vB3 I'm also planning to upgrade the webserver to a new and more powerful one. A bunch of testing & other details will need to be taken care of first with the server upgrade before getting along with the vB3 upgrade.

One other issue that may possibly hold us back on the vB3 upgrade is a bug in the PHP 4.3.10. I'd like to have the most current & stable version of PHP when GC vB3 goes on the new server. The bug in PHP 4.3.10 causes high server loads & generally slows things down a lot, you can see the details on that at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=31332 PHP 4.3.11-dev has a fix for the bug, but I'd rather not upgrade to that until it is released as a stable version. If PHP 4.3.11 is not available by the time GC's upgrade to vB3 is on the way, I might just use 4.3.9, but will see when that time comes.

I'm not sure yet about which optional vB3 features will be enabled on GC. I'll be looking into all of that in the coming weeks. Regarding avatars & attachments: not sure at this point due to bandwidth & database size considerations.

Re: Re: VBulletin 3.x
 

Yes, that is an add-on script. I used it on a different forum as well (which has already been upgraded to vB3) and had to remove the script since I was not able to get the script working with the new vB3 database (didn't really have much time to work on the issue yet). The other site is very small compared to GC, some of the stuff I do on that site is done partly to test things out with new software before it's deployed on GC.

If I'm recalling correctly, I believe that issue was due to a log file growing up to the file size limitation on the server which resulted in the webserver application basically shutting down (since it could no longer write additional info to the log file). That's fairly easy to fix, but I didn't notice the problem until a few days after it happened. At some point after the new server & vB3 upgrades I'll be looking into having the server send a text message to my cell phone a soon as something like that happens in the future, so that I know about it right away.

We love you John! http://members.ispwest.com/navane/wub.gif

.....Kelly :)

ya know, when i read a post from john, i feel like the voice of god is comming down.

Thank You "Hal" ( :D ) for the update!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank goodness it is working and We All can keep updating with each other!:)

As KDDani said, it is Free. There is no better Site than GC!

John, Thanks so very much!:cool:

although i have absolutely no idea what you just said, it sounds wonderful! i am sure whatever upgrades you are considering/making will be fabulous. thanks so much for your work!

:)

john, it's all good whatever you do!
we're with you.

we got your back, John,

The vBulletin folks've been busy. :) Apparently forums running version 2 should upgrade to at least 2.3.7 for security reasons; GC is currently on v2.3.6? Or, the upgrade of GreekChat to v3.0.7 of vBulletin might be just as practical now. Looks like they finally fixed this with PHP 4.3.11 since released as a stable version. :)