|
1) The owners (me, Damon, Steve) and most of the old time members hate the UBB style. 2) There are lots of features (primarily Vote to Delete) that are used heavily and are not part of vBB. 3) This software is message based, not thread based, so you have a lot finer control over looking at your messages, replies, etc. vBB style lumps everything into threads and the individual messages are not divisible from that. 4) In just the two main forums (General and Technical) we have over 1.5 Million messages. I don't know if vBB can handle that kind of load or not, but that's what we have and we've never had a problem (database query times are not the issue). 5) vBB's access numbers are VERY misleading, while our load numbers are accurate. I just discovered on a vBB board yesterday that when I viewed a thread I created it counted as TWO views. In our software, the person who posted a message doesn't get counted as a view when they view it. When others view it, it counts as 1 view hit, not 2. I wonder what that says about the 'currently online' statistics, etc. for vBB style boards. Here, the online count is anybody who has had any activity on the board in the past 15 minutes. 6) Our primary server crashed back in October and we were forced to move everything to our little database server which is an old Pentium III 800. We are supporting > 1,000 unique visitors and approximately 85,000-90,000 hits a day on this piece of hardware right now and it is sitting on a 768k DSL line so you can imagine that it is totally choked. Within the next two weeks we will have our dual servers set up again and will be in a professional colocation facility giving us 10Megabit upload speeds to the internet so it will be a hell of a lot faster. 7) The theme/template capabilities, you are right, are used by a minority of people, but it gives you ultimate flexibility. If you like the thread based style of UBB with threads re-arranged by the last reply time, then choose the UBB skin we have and you'll get that. People who hate that style (like me) can continue to use the 'mid-90's' style layout and we can all live in harmony. :-) 8) I think our biggest problem is that with the proliferation of fly-by-night vBB boards out there, a lot of newcomers are hitting our site and are familiar with the vBB layout. We simply need to make our vBB style more robust and more apparent to those new users so they feel more comfortable, while not alienating our install base that choose our regular view modes. 9) I love to program. It was my profession and now is my hobby. If we switched to vBB I wouldn't be able to have as much fun anymore. ;-)
 |
