Achtung! Here comes HC 3.x

PunkKitty

PunkKitty

Horny bag of electric meat
Anderton announced an upgrade.

What could possibly go wrong?
IT'S TIME FOR THE NEW PLATFORM!!!

Dear extremely patient people,

Before the end of January, Harmony Central will move its forums and content to a new platform. Frankly, we’re pushing this ahead of schedule because we just can’t wait any longer to have a functional, stable home for what has got to be the most loyal and patient online community on the planet (maybe even the galaxy). We’ve been testing, running the workflow past regular users, checking off bugs, and we admit it, doing a few burnt offerings to the Gods of Endless Code . . . and so far, all signs say “go.”

However, there are a few of what software manufacturers refer to euphemistically as “known issues” (translation: “we know it’s a problem, but we haven’t been able to fix it yet”). Namely...

* At a certain date (we’ll announce it, but it’s pretty soon), all content and posts will be migrated to the new platform. That’s the good news. The bad news is that anything past that date can’t be part of the migration process, which is fairly lengthy. So, posts after migration begins will be gone forever. If you post the answer to the meaning of life after migration begins, please save it and re-post in the new environment.
* Private messages and attachments in vBulletin can’t be migrated. Anything embedded in a post (YouTube video, image, etc.) will migrate; it’s only files attached to the message that will be lost.
* We may have multiquote at launch, but probably not.
* We will not have Open Jam or the Political Forum at the outset. We need to limit traffic until we know things are working. Yes, that sucks. Yes, I know. I've argued against this and there's nothing I can do about it.
* There will be no reviews of any kind—pro reviews, user reviews, or review articles written by our staff—until February, and possibly March. Separating them out lets us switch over to the forums sooner, and we don’t think anyone will consider that a bad tradeoff.

Are we nervous? You bet. We all remember what happened with the “revision-whose-name-we-dare-not-speak.” But one of the problems before was that we moved from a site that was falling apart, yet still functional, to one that was totally dysfunctional. This time, we’re moving from a dysfunctional platform to one that shows tremendous promise.

Two more things. First, much of the non-forum parts of the site will have to be reconstructed. You may run across articles that haven’t been formatted properly, or are missing audio examples. We’ll be going through the articles one-by-one and prepping them, which will be time-consuming but also gives us a chance to do some tweaks and revisions. It’s all good.

Second, and most importantly, you have no idea how grateful we are for those of you who didn’t give up on HC. If you think this has been frustrating for you, imagine how we felt as we watched the site we’ve poured our lives into fall apart. Yes, we’re nervous . . . but we think our faith will be rewarded. And as a result, we think yours will be, too.

You have our deepest thanks and respect. Now, I have to stop typing so I can go back to crossing my fingers.

--Craig Anderton on behalf of the entire Harmony Central team (including the hamsters who kept the vBulletin servers running, No worries, they’ll be getting a generous severance package.)
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I saw that earlier.

I will take a moment to ask that folks discuss the site issue itself and not comment on or sling poo at anyone else.
 
Honestly, it can't be much worse. HC didn't get a GPOTD yesterday because I couldn't actually get the forums to load.
 
I think it's obvious this has been needed for awhile. Hopefully, they learned their lessons after being sold that last load of Jive.
 
I don't really get the :facepalm:.

Neither Anderton or anyone else is denying 2.0 was a total failure, and the forums as they are are close to unusable. Something has to be done, and for technical reasons beyond my understanding continuing with vBulletin is not the answer.

The company they are going with provides the platform for some pretty big forums, and from what I've seen it looks promising. :shrug:

I mean I don't really blame people for questioning HC's judgement after the 2.0 thing but I'd at least wait for the changeover before slagging it.
 
i-like-where-this-is-going.jpg
 
Actionsquid said:
I don't really get the :facepalm:.

Neither Anderton or anyone else is denying 2.0 was a total failure, and the forums as they are are close to unusable. Something has to be done, and for technical reasons beyond my understanding continuing with vBulletin is not the answer.

The company they are going with provides the platform for some pretty big forums, and from what I've seen it looks promising. :shrug:

I mean I don't really blame people for questioning HC's judgement after the 2.0 thing but I'd at least wait for the changeover before slagging it.
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Why wait when you can naysay from the very beginning?!
 
Hopefully they choose something that works well this time around. I'd hate to see the place die after another failed format change.
 
Actionsquid said:
I don't really get the :facepalm:.

Neither Anderton or anyone else is denying 2.0 was a total failure, and the forums as they are are close to unusable. Something has to be done, and for technical reasons beyond my understanding continuing with vBulletin is not the answer.

The company they are going with provides the platform for some pretty big forums, and from what I've seen it looks promising. :shrug:

I mean I don't really blame people for questioning HC's judgement after the 2.0 thing but I'd at least wait for the changeover before slagging it.
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I guess for some it is like the alcoholic who keeps swearing they'll never drink again. We'll believe it when we see it. :grin:
 
Actionsquid said:
I don't really get the :facepalm:.

Neither Anderton or anyone else is denying 2.0 was a total failure, and the forums as they are are close to unusable. Something has to be done, and for technical reasons beyond my understanding continuing with vBulletin is not the answer.

The company they are going with provides the platform for some pretty big forums, and from what I've seen it looks promising. :shrug:

I mean I don't really blame people for questioning HC's judgement after the 2.0 thing but I'd at least wait for the changeover before slagging it.
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I just think that folks have seen so much poor management of the site over there that they are really skeptical that things are going to go smoothly. It would be nice if it did but i think that even if everything goes well people will find something to bitch about.

Honestly I still don't understand why they can't make it work on vBulletin. Most of the rest of the world is, with many larger sites. That fact alone makes me uncomfortable that they will pull this off well since the things that probably made the vBulletin site unusable will still be issues with the new site if they don't make some significant changes to how they maintain the new place.


I'm not slagging, because I really hope that they get it figured out. This is my "home base" online but next comes HC and I would be pretty unhappy if they wrecked it further. Like I mentioned in another thread yesterday people can come here or TGP or any of the other forums but you won't retain what makes HC what we all wanted to hang out at in the first place if they do. I can't have that kind of posting here on my companys' dime but I enjoy the carnage on HC most of the time.
 
Standard ploy of dictators. Break it intentionally, then have the "solution" all ready to go when the riots begin. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
 
Mark Wein said:
I just think that folks have seen so much poor management of the site over there that they are really skeptical that things are going to go smoothly. It would be nice if it did but i think that even if everything goes well people will find something to bitch about.

Honestly I still don't understand why they can't make it work on vBulletin. Most of the rest of the world is, with many larger sites. That fact alone makes me uncomfortable that they will pull this off well since the things that probably made the vBulletin site unusable will still be issues with the new site if they don't make some significant changes to how they maintain the new place.


I'm not slagging, because I really hope that they get it figured out. This is my "home base" online but next comes HC and I would be pretty unhappy if they wrecked it further. Like I mentioned in another thread yesterday people can come here or TGP or any of the other forums but you won't retain what makes HC what we all wanted to hang out at in the first place if they do. I can't have that kind of posting here on my companys' dime but I enjoy the carnage on HC most of the time.
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Like I said I'm pretty ignorant of the tech stuff, but my understanding (I could totally be wrong) is that vBulletin is not a good choice for a big site with lots of traffic when you have a very small IT team.
:shrug:

I dunno. I'm anxious to see the new site. I guess well see.
 
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