- 14 Mar 2002
- 15,973
- 9,211
- 749
Dear valued Members,
after having relied on vBulletin for over twelve years, the day to convert the Japan Forum to a new software has finally come.
Our current forum software is no longer actively developed and supported, and the latest version of vBulletin is of such inferior quality that the company owning the software is rapidly losing ground. We have decided to abandon ship and move to Xenforo, a small British developer and without doubt the shooting star in forum development, founded by the very same programmers who were responsible for vBulletin until 2009.
Some of you will remember our efforts in the spring of last year (here and here) to convert the forum as well as the ensuing database discrepancies we faced due to inconsistent language encoding. While we still have not solved those database issues, I have decided to tackle the conversion and to clean up the database manually. The reasons for the rushed upgrade are mostly of technical nature.
Schedule:
I'm planning to start the upgrade on Monday, October 6th around 0800AM JST. Today, I conducted a dry run, importing the vBulletin DB into Xenforo which took about 8 hours. Add a few hours to set up the redirects, implement a few add-ons, apply some make-up, etc and I expect to be back online Monday night. We shall keep you informed on a splash page right here on the forum as well as on the JREF Facebook page.
Expected issues:
Encoding! Unfortunately, most of the threads in the 日本語 fora will not be properly imported, resulting in what I estimate to be 80-90 percent mojibake. We therefore have to embark on the Herculean task of manually editting thousands of posts, a procedure that I reckon will take many weeks and months, which however I'm willing to take on in order to save the integrity and the totality of 12 years of posts and threads, discussions, joy and tears, controversy and language study.
Yes, there will be change(s), there will be things missing and brand-new features alien to everyone, there will be - yet again - a new design, but bear with us and we shall soon be able to make the forum a cozy place that's ready for the future.
I thank you for your understanding, your patience and your continued support!
after having relied on vBulletin for over twelve years, the day to convert the Japan Forum to a new software has finally come.
Our current forum software is no longer actively developed and supported, and the latest version of vBulletin is of such inferior quality that the company owning the software is rapidly losing ground. We have decided to abandon ship and move to Xenforo, a small British developer and without doubt the shooting star in forum development, founded by the very same programmers who were responsible for vBulletin until 2009.
Some of you will remember our efforts in the spring of last year (here and here) to convert the forum as well as the ensuing database discrepancies we faced due to inconsistent language encoding. While we still have not solved those database issues, I have decided to tackle the conversion and to clean up the database manually. The reasons for the rushed upgrade are mostly of technical nature.
Schedule:
I'm planning to start the upgrade on Monday, October 6th around 0800AM JST. Today, I conducted a dry run, importing the vBulletin DB into Xenforo which took about 8 hours. Add a few hours to set up the redirects, implement a few add-ons, apply some make-up, etc and I expect to be back online Monday night. We shall keep you informed on a splash page right here on the forum as well as on the JREF Facebook page.
Expected issues:
Encoding! Unfortunately, most of the threads in the 日本語 fora will not be properly imported, resulting in what I estimate to be 80-90 percent mojibake. We therefore have to embark on the Herculean task of manually editting thousands of posts, a procedure that I reckon will take many weeks and months, which however I'm willing to take on in order to save the integrity and the totality of 12 years of posts and threads, discussions, joy and tears, controversy and language study.
Yes, there will be change(s), there will be things missing and brand-new features alien to everyone, there will be - yet again - a new design, but bear with us and we shall soon be able to make the forum a cozy place that's ready for the future.
I thank you for your understanding, your patience and your continued support!