[Mark]

Hi all,

After recent events and general desire for the forum to be upgraded, James and I have decided to upgrade the forum to vBulletin software. We have purchased it (it's not free) as well as purchasing some additional extra's (which I'll explain in a minute) and are currently spending on time testing it and familiarising ourselves with it.

The good news is that all posts/threads/u2u's and all that stuff is transferable over to the new software, and is currently in transition at the moment. We think most of the attachments should make it, but some might not make the cut. We will update you more on that nearer the time.

A lot of you have probably used VBUlletin on other forums, it's by far the most advanced and most secure forum software available, and there loads of new options will be available in your Control Panel. We are moving to VBulletin as part of TiBBs expansion into just not a Big Brother based website. This transition for the forum should be fairly straight forward, but for the website may be a few months away - the main reason being it's only James and I working on things, and we have lives to lead outside TiBB!

As I mentioned we are currently in the process of shifting all the data into the new database. There's a bit of tweaking that needs to make place to make sure all information from the current forum is compatible with the new forum, and it shouldn't take us more than a few days from now until that is complete. We are then going to have a 1 week beta-test period of the new forum, which serves a few purposes.

i) Moderators can get used to the new system in place to moderate the boards. Mods now have a joint control panel which makes everything a LOT easier than them being spammed with U2U's every new report
ii) Allows James and I to add all the modifications that were on our old board, to the new board
iii) Allows a few people to test everything out, try all the new options and give the board a good test to make sure everything is ready to go live.

I know the demand to beta-test the new board is going to be heavy, and there's no real easy way to select people without being biased so I'm going to do it by random as it's the only fair way. I have selected a number between 1 and 1000 (only James and I know it), and you can U2U me your guess. The nearest 6 people will then be given a username/password (when we've set it up), and you get test away. Please only U2U if you are interested in trying out all the new features, and are willing to give us your opinions on what’s good and bad. (Mods need not apply, as they will get access anyway). This is open to people with more than 1000 posts.

A sneak peak of a couple of features the new forum has are:

Blogs!: A much requested feature, blogs are now integrated into your forum account. Blogs can be rated/commented etc and will hopefully play a big part in our transition into TiBB v2.0. Feel free to blog about absolutely anything!

Arcade: Another requested feature, a flash game arcade will be available. There are 8 games available, with built in leader boards and high scores. You can also create tournaments between yourselves and that sort of stuff.

Live update topic: This is something we are excited about, and will be great for topics which have a lot of replies in a short period of time. When you post a reply using the Quick Reply box and press OK, your post will appear in front of you attached to the thread without going via a "Thanks for posting" page. You can then stay on the page, and watch other peoples replies appear right in front of you, without even having to refresh! This saves you having to navigate around the forum and then back to the last post in the thread to see if there have been any replies.

Social Groups: We still aren't sure how we want these to work, and hopefully the beta-test will give us a better idea, but Social Groups are new areas of the forum (similar to Sub Forums), but are highly customisable for group creators. Each group has its own discussion board, and will have a creator. The creator can message all people in the group; have a group icon and that sort of stuff. You can only see posts from that social group if you join it. To avoid people wanting to be the first to create social groups, if you created the original topic on current TiBB, you have first choice to be in charge of the group. I haven't had much time to play around with them yet, so hopefully some of you can in the beta.


So in the meantime, please use this topic to ask questions, as well as give suggestions into what features you want on the new board, and I'll let you know if we can add them. If you are interested in helping to beta-test, just U2U me a number between 1 and 1000

We are also looking for someone to help us out with some graphics for the forum. If you are interested, just drop me a U2U with a link to some of your work and I'll get you setup with beta access also.

I think that's all for now... feel free to ask away!

Mark