Made it onto the New forums

[Guest Ryan EliteEnt]

I finally got Logged into the new forums. Having to reset the password kept me off this long......

[Guest michael^heaven]

Yeh, I had a bitch of a time logging in, initially. I had to email the admins for help. After they changed my password, I was able to log-in finally. I wonder if other people are having the same problem? It seems like fewer CJ'rs are posting since the upgrade.

[Guest talknightlife]

There has been an obvious drop in message volume since the facelift, but the Alexa rank is still stable. Lurkers continue to visit. I didn't have anything to do with any of this but I've been observing since it was my site and all...

My forum migration plan was to go smoothly from the YaBB that worked fine for five years to the modern descendant of YaBB, Simple Machines. It's non-commercial and open source and "free" as in "liberty" as well as "free" like "free beer". It would have looked nearly identical to the old CoolJunkie but it would have had more features, like a working search box for example. I was focused on features that people had specifically requested and I tried for years to move us all to the latest Simple Machines to get the search box working. It has all of Pod's favorite admin features.

Now the search box works, but nobody is posting. I could have made the transition go so smoothly that nobody would have even noticed that we had updated, and I wish I'd had the opportunity. Oh well.

They also threw five years' worth of hard-earned search ranks from YaBB out the door and traded them for that splog spam junk that you see at the bottom of every page here. Now it's too late to transition those search ranks to the new thing. Oops. Like New Coke, the effects of the New CoolJunkie disaster will be obvious soon enough.

[Guest 00crystal00]

i had to create a whole new SN. Pod reset my pw but it still didn't work so i gave up and just made a new name =\

good bye posts

[Oni1414777741]

It was a pain for me, but it worked.

[ryan2772]

why is everything blue now???

[Guest ICON]

There has been an obvious drop in message volume since the facelift, but the Alexa rank is still stable. Lurkers continue to visit. I didn't have anything to do with any of this but I've been observing since it was my site and all...

You cant really go with what Alexa stats says.. its complete false and bullshit... How many of you on here actually have the Alexa toolbar installed on your computers? Alexa does their ranking soley on how many people have the alexa toolbars installed on their computers and how many times they visit specific pages.

[Guest Ryan EliteEnt]

There has been an obvious drop in message volume since the facelift, but the Alexa rank is still stable. Lurkers continue to visit. I didn't have anything to do with any of this but I've been observing since it was my site and all...

My forum migration plan was to go smoothly from the YaBB that worked fine for five years to the modern descendant of YaBB, Simple Machines. It's non-commercial and open source and "free" as in "liberty" as well as "free" like "free beer". It would have looked nearly identical to the old CoolJunkie but it would have had more features, like a working search box for example. I was focused on features that people had specifically requested and I tried for years to move us all to the latest Simple Machines to get the search box working. It has all of Pod's favorite admin features.

Now the search box works, but nobody is posting. I could have made the transition go so smoothly that nobody would have even noticed that we had updated, and I wish I'd had the opportunity. Oh well.

They also threw five years' worth of hard-earned search ranks from YaBB out the door and traded them for that splog spam junk that you see at the bottom of every page here. Now it's too late to transition those search ranks to the new thing. Oops. Like New Coke, the effects of the New CoolJunkie disaster will be obvious soon enough.

I liked the old forums a lot more!! But I really don’t like change on things I like anyway, so that might be some of it. But I wish it was done the way you said, where it was updated with nobody noticing. You can see a huge drop off in posts. Hope it picks up soon! The board is very boring right now.

[Guest ICON]

I just dont get it. What is so difficult about this new format? You read a post and you reply to it. It doesnt take a rocket scientist.

A few things that are FAR better than the old one (In My Opinion)

1) Posting YouTube Videos

2) Posting images

3) Posting media

4) Quick Reply box

5) PHOTO GALLERY!

6) WYSIWYG HTML advanced editor.

as for your user name being changed... POD said there was nothing that they could do about that and to shoot him a message and he will change it from his cPanel... I did it this morning at 2am and it was changed when i woke up... not a big deal.

To me, the forums look the exact same except for the gradient background in the title bars and a few images.

People say it was soooo difficult to change their password. How? The system emails you the password and you click a link in the email and simply add your password. Are people that lazy these days to complain about that? Come on people!!

Everybody said CJ is dead and wont be around much longer bla bla bla... I dont know many sites that take the time to upgrade their system knowing that they wont be around much longer.. at least be happy that they arent going away anytime soon.

[ryan2772]

I just dont get it. What is so difficult about this new format? You read a post and you reply to it. It doesnt take a rocket scientist.

A few things that are FAR better than the old one (In My Opinion)

1) Posting YouTube Videos

2) Posting images

3) Posting media

4) Quick Reply box

5) PHOTO GALLERY!

6) WYSIWYG HTML advanced editor.

as for your user name being changed... POD said there was nothing that they could do about that and to shoot him a message and he will change it from his cPanel... I did it this morning at 2am and it was changed when i woke up... not a big deal.

To me, the forums look the exact same except for the gradient background in the title bars and a few images.

People say it was soooo difficult to change their password. How? The system emails you the password and you click a link in the email and simply add your password. Are people that lazy these days to complain about that? Come on people!!

Everybody said CJ is dead and wont be around much longer bla bla bla... I dont know many sites that take the time to upgrade their system knowing that they wont be around much longer.. at least be happy that they arent going away anytime soon.

but what about everything being blue now??? it's so weird...

[Guest Ryan EliteEnt]

I just dont get it. What is so difficult about this new format? You read a post and you reply to it. It doesnt take a rocket scientist.

A few things that are FAR better than the old one (In My Opinion)

1) Posting YouTube Videos

2) Posting images

3) Posting media

4) Quick Reply box

5) PHOTO GALLERY!

6) WYSIWYG HTML advanced editor.

as for your user name being changed... POD said there was nothing that they could do about that and to shoot him a message and he will change it from his cPanel... I did it this morning at 2am and it was changed when i woke up... not a big deal.

To me, the forums look the exact same except for the gradient background in the title bars and a few images.

People say it was soooo difficult to change their password. How? The system emails you the password and you click a link in the email and simply add your password. Are people that lazy these days to complain about that? Come on people!!

Everybody said CJ is dead and wont be around much longer bla bla bla... I dont know many sites that take the time to upgrade their system knowing that they wont be around much longer.. at least be happy that they arent going away anytime soon.

People are lazy; no one said they are not. That’s the point. We are all too lazy to take the time to do the small things. And there was a comfort level with the old site. I know what I wanted to see, where it would be and I like the look because I was use-to it. Now I will get use to the new one too and everything will be fine. But until then, I will not be happy with it.

[Guest 00crystal00]

People say it was soooo difficult to change their password. How? The system emails you the password and you click a link in the email and simply add your password. Are people that lazy these days to complain about that? Come on people!!

makes it a bit hard when hotmail filters the email they send and i never get it. i am not lazy just have an old email address attached to the acct which sucks

[Guest talknightlife]

This facelift just reminds me of New Coke.

[Guest ICON]

This facelift just reminds me of New Coke.

why?

[Guest coach]

A few things that are FAR better than the old one (In My Opinion)

1) Posting YouTube Videos

2) Posting images

3) Posting media

4) Quick Reply box

5) PHOTO GALLERY!

6) WYSIWYG HTML advanced editor.

Really, I haven't noticed any difference on any of this, except the Quick Reply, which doesn't seem to be working in Opera, anyway.

I did notice that you can now attach images, rather than just link from outside sources, which is nice, I guess.

[Guest ICON]

Really, I haven't noticed any difference on any of this, except the Quick Reply, which doesn't seem to be working in Opera, anyway.

I did notice that you can now attach images, rather than just link from outside sources, which is nice, I guess.

I guess we see things in a different perspective then.

[Guest talknightlife]

I guess we see things in a different perspective then.

Here are some screenshots from a few different perspectives. The forum malfunctioned the first time that I tried to post this message and I lost what I typed the first time. Apparently if you upload an attachment first and then edit the message, it breaks. I ended up at a blank page and when I went back, my message was gone.

The first attachment shows the rich text editor from the Microsoft Internet Explorer, versus Safari in the second attachment. I don't understand why anybody in 2007 would optimize a web site specifically for Internet Explorer and not for standard, modern browsers. We're on the cusp of web 2.0, and "Optimized for the Microsoft Internet Explorer" is a big step backwards. There are rich text editors that work in every browser, why not use one?

The next two attachments show what your image attachments to this message looked like for me from Firefox, and the Internet Explorer. Maybe other people are having better luck, but I can only see those image attachments from Safari.

Signatures are still invisible everywhere except for the message preview form.

[Guest coach]

Talkn - I can see signatures.

Icon - Nice screenies, I guess I just haven't tried any of that stuff.

[Guest talknightlife]

Talkn - I can see signatures.

That's because you're using Opera. Opera seems to be the only browser where signatures work. See enclosed screenshots from Opera (signatures work), Firefox (no signatures), Safari (no signatures) and Microsoft Internet Exploder (no signatures?!?).

I thought that the point of using a commercial product like vBulletin, as opposed to the open-source software that I prefer, was that it would 'just work'? Track made some enormous technical mistakes with this forum, I hope that they fix them soon.

[Guest talknightlife]

The forum shrank the bug report images that I just posted so that you can't even see them. I guess that I should have hosted them somewhere and used a URL to reference them, like the Old Way. I don't see the point in allowing people to post image attachments if they're going to get shrunk down to 317x280 pixels.

[Guest ICON]

well i can tell u first hand that FireFox fucking sucks.

I use IE and i see signatures... as for the images... im sure its a simple fix in the settings.

Here is what your signature reads in IE

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"

VBulletin is the #1 message forum software on the planet... what would you use in its place? Please dont tell me a custom script that you could have created.

[Guest talknightlife]

well i can tell u first hand that FireFox fucking sucks.

I use IE and i see signatures... as for the images... im sure its a simple fix in the settings.

Here is what your signature reads in IE

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"

VBulletin is the #1 message forum software on the planet... what would you use in its place? Please dont tell me a custom script that you could have created.

See the above screenshots to see what I see in IE7. No signatures. Maybe they work in one version of IE and not another. Do I have to upgrade from XP to Vista to get the forum to work or something?

For CoolJunkie, I would have used Simple Machines because that's the current version of what we had used before. Smoother upgrade and nobody would have noticed that anything changed.

For a new site I wouldn't use Simple Machines. I would use phpBB3, a very elegant and modern Web 2.0 design. vBulletin is a very Web 1.0 product, as you can see from code like this in the CoolJunkie forum theme:

style="display:block; width:540px; height:250px"

There are these things that were invented a decade ago called "style sheets" that allow you to get crap like that out of the page body so that people don't have to load the layout information every single time they load a new page.

Firefox sucks? I use Safari every day and even I admit that Firefox is the best and most modern browser in existence, with the best standards compliance of any browser. I'm glad that you're happy with this built-for-Internet-Explorer site, but building a site for any one specific browser is Web 1.0. We're now at Web 2.0, where standards finally work and now sites can work in every browser.