• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

2021 OGBoards Fundraiser

i feel pretty ignorant about INTERNET when i'm reading the costs to run/maintain/upgrade a message board. damn
 
BiffTannen said:
Just wanted to point out that we have a lot fewer posters than we did the last time we had one of these pledge drives so we might need to dig a little deeper.
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Are you sure that difference isn't just the moonz parodies?
 
Shouldn't there be enough cash left over from the ogboards.com Dino Gaudio buyout fundraiser?

With interest should be north of $125 by now.
 
pretty sure RSF still has leftover funds from the Bzzout billboard
 
cookoutdeac said:
We're eying a switch to an entirely different software system, which means logistics have been a little hairier to figure out than past vbulletin upgrades (which were more or less plug'n'play with just a little bit of downtime). The total costs, just monetarily speaking, are probably going to be somewhere between 2-300 dollars for the software license itself and potential addons, more if we have to involve any technical consulting (which I'm hoping to not need, but we do have a pretty big database right now). There will be some growing pains since we're all pretty familiar with the software here and over the years TWDeac and I have added lots of various touches to improve things, so we may have feature gaps we have to work to fill from the get-go, but I think we'll see some more up-to-date behavior that means those add-ons aren't as needed.

I think just getting on something more modern should hopefully immediately improve things on the speed front, but if we don't see noticeable upgrades on that front from software changes alone, phase 2 will be seeking another hosting provider since I think they're sub-optimal lately (and tbh we may have to push that up as part of upgrade, depending on full requirements for new software stack). A third option may involve having to start archiving and culling old enough threads. We've always really prided ourselves on having a long history to search through here, but the truth is that it's a very large set of data to maintain and move around and keep optimized, which is why most forums implement some sort of hard cutoffs with archiving. It'll be a last resort, but I wouldn't be surprised if we finally have to take that plunge just to keep things snappy.
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Are we sticking with VBulletin? They've always been my forum software of choice. Most others I've seen on college message boards are either the same or worse than ours in terms of functionality. Are there any other sites you could point us to that are similar to what we'll be upgrading to (interface wise)? I'll be donating either way, just curious.
 
Brendan207 said:
Are we sticking with VBulletin? They've always been my forum software of choice. Most others I've seen on college message boards are either the same or worse than ours in terms of functionality. Are there any other sites you could point us to that are similar to what we'll be upgrading to (interface wise)? I'll be donating either way, just curious.
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No, from what research I've done the most recent version of vBulletin is a mess and the core devs from that company left a few years ago to start the company/software we're probably going to go with, XenForo. I've participated in at least one forum that uses XenForo and it's a pretty great experience.. stuff like @ messaging, way better spam detection so our user registration process is faster, potential for better searching, much better SEO tooling, while still maintaining a very good UX/UI. I'm very excited to (hopefully) make the switch.
 
Thanks for all of the donations so far. For those that send checks, I'll try my best to PM you once it arrives. For those on Venmo, I'm liking the notification as confirmation. For Paypal, well Paypal sucks and does not make it easy for me to confirm. However, if you see a confirmation from either Riverside BBQ or Fulton Creek Farms, it went through :)
 
cookoutdeac said:
No, from what research I've done the most recent version of vBulletin is a mess and the core devs from that company left a few years ago to start the company/software we're probably going to go with, XenForo. I've participated in at least one forum that uses XenForo and it's a pretty great experience.. stuff like @ messaging, way better spam detection so our user registration process is faster, potential for better searching, much better SEO tooling, while still maintaining a very good UX/UI. I'm very excited to (hopefully) make the switch.
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Do you also have a strategy to increase the need for a faster registration process? At the rate we're growing, I'm pretty sure we could do user registration by courier pigeon and y'all could handle it.
 
WFU03 said:
Do you also have a strategy to increase the need for a faster registration process? At the rate we're growing, I'm pretty sure we could do user registration by courier pigeon and y'all could handle it.
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Better SEO helps but you'd probably be surprised by how many people register and just lurk.
 
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