Fraught From Forums
Posted under: Last few days have been spent messing around with the Loquax forums. The switch over from phpBB to vBulletin went smoothly enough and the new forum looks great – however most of the time has been spent doing admin. Lost usernames, forgotten passwords, failed logins – it’s been non stop and very time consuming.
Although a lot of the options to retrieve details are on the site, we have problems from AOL who block all emails from us these days. In some ways I think AOL should foot our admin bill as 90% of all our admin/support enquiries stem from their ISP users who because of AOL’s inability to distinguish between spam and double opt in email adds extra work load to our business.
Overall though, the good news is that the users seem to like the new system. We had just the one “i preferred the old forum” and a couple “if it wasn’t broke..” grumbles. The best though was “the colours look bland”, which was kind of strange as the colours were identical to the old forum!!
Activity though is up and the move to vBulletin has definately been worthwhile. Our server load is low which is a major bonus as phpBB caused us far too many load issues and too often caused site wide issues. Now for some much needed sleep!