Floris

Dear visitors,

With this announcement we'd like to inform you that we will be undergoing scheduled maintenance during the month May.

Schedule:

May 6th, 2009 : Network Closed during non-peak hours. (completed)

May 13th, 2009 : Forums Shortly Closed for database maintenance (completed)

May 20th, 2009 : Features Temporary Disabled for optimization (forums remain open) (completed)

May 27th, 2009 : Final Touches (scheduled to complete anything we did not get around to the other weeks) (completed)

We will have one or more days to tweak our server software, our community software, our boards' settings, to optimize our databases and improve our site experience. To just name a few things on the todo list.

We are a ring of communities, such as vbulletin-fans.com as well as vbulletin-chat.com, and others. vBulletin-Chat.com is going to get dissolved. However, our content will not go to waste. Your created accounts will still work, your threads and posts will be available under our main site vbulletin-fans.com.

This means unlike other months where we guarantee no downtime, we will be experiencing potential downtime. If this is the case you're invited to come chat on http://vbirc.com/chat (irc.vbirc.com in channel: #chat)

In other news, our sister network "wetalk" will open up new communities and continue building interesting content in the form of a social network. We're looking forward doing business with wetalk network in the future. At the moment the TV and MOVIES forums are open, and the GAMES and BOOKS forums are being build. The MUSIC and SPORTS forums will open this summer. We're looking forward having you as a member there too for our off-topic discussions.

Floris

The "vBulletin ProStyle" forum has been dissolved. More information here: http://www.vbulletin-fans.com/showthread.php?t=29724

The vBulletin Premium Forums have been dissolved. - Premium forum content (moved into The Lounge forum) - Marketplace forum (moved to vbfans.com > Managing Your vBulletin category) - Featured Communities forum (moved to vbfans.com > Modifying Your vBulletin category) - The Forum Owner Discussions forum has been deleted, it's content merged with the Managing & Operating your Community forum. - Paid Subscriptions Model has been discontinued. (users will still show as premium members of course)

vBulletin-Chat.com dissolved (Content merged into 1 new vbfans.com forum: real time irc live chat)

Some of the forums have been merged together to clean up the overview/structure and give an easier to understand/navigate end result

The Project Tools has been upgraded from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1 (maintenance release)

Forum Dude

Though this might be considered downsizing, I'm glad to see the forum is scheduled for maintenance.

Floris

Yes, we have learned in the last few years it is harder to get regular staff members, to be active ourselves, and to have our community participate in creating content. Oversized communities with our level of activity means that action is required. To ensure less spam, more content, active content, and staff + community participation.. etc ... it is required to kinda downsize, despite that no content or user accounts are lost.

The actions are not just my preferences, but feedback in consensus with feedback from the community, as well as complaints and suggestions from guests and sponsors, and premium members. Hopefully ending up with a bit more organized and cleaned up community, easier structure and overview.

Floris

We've completed almost everything in May, and more work will be done in June, thankfully as it looks now, this won't have an effect on the boards and the users won't notice a thing.

Floris

The work in June was not worth mentioning, most of it was planning for July/August.

Now that it is July, some changes are ahead (most will be announced soon via an email and separate announcement).

The categories and forums from community: http://www.vBulletin-Tutorials.com/ are now merged into the main site vbfans.com The threads are moved into 1 forum: http://www.vbulletin-fans.com/forumdisplay.php?f=564 No data was lost, it's all still there.

vbfans community software upgraded to vbulletin version 3.8.3 stable

Chimpie

Keep up the good work Floris.

Floris

And today vbstyles ..

The categories and forums from community: http://www.vBulletin-Styles.com are now merged into the main site vbfans.com The next day or so we will slowly merge the forums into eachother and give them a more logical structure. No data was lost, it's all still there.