Before upgrading BowlingCommunity.com I created a separate "test board" where I imported all the members and a single forum from the existing community and also created a test forum and a suggestions/questions forum. It was up for only seven days. I heavily promoted it throughout BowlingFans.com, linking to a features/change list and explained everything and why the change was needed so all the active members knew this is they'd soon be using.

I got a few questions about the new features. But mostly compliments. The biggest complaint my users had was the number of ads and the addition of ads between the 1st and 2nd post so I removed a few other ads from the left column. And the complaints stopped.

I believe if you give your users a preview of whats coming and the opportunity to make suggestions BEFORE you make the change the resistance to the change is much reduced as they feel more involved.

lol Rick, perhaps we should add colour tags, you know, conform to the ukers :nod:

I just forced UBB7 on my people, posting was down, traffic was up; still really the same thing so i basically did things for me

Hi,

I did put up two test sites - the later one being 7.1b2 - problem is hardly anyone bothered to visit it...

I remember moans when I switched from classic to threads about 4 or 5 years ago, and probably had similar moans when I switched from whatever I was using to classic - simple truth is that people dislike change...

I am really not too worried, but sadly I am partially disabled, which has side effects like a loss of brain power and depression - so I must apologise if I sounded off in my earlier posts.

Hopefully I can get my head around a couple more stylesheets and this will keep them happy.

They are still posting - so it is not all bad

As I told ou at UBBDev, give me your old styles

I think I have figured out why it wasn't working - the tag had got altered some time ago on my previous forums. Thanks.

Hahahahahahahahaha

Oh I'm so glad that I am not alone.

I think *every* upgrade I have ever done people have bitched and moaned about and made me regret spending the days and days to get it done.

I am worried about moving to 7.x and I think I will wait for 7.1 before I do as I do not want to loose features that people may be using, but like it or not, it will be upgraded and if they don't like it, then they know where they can go.

The biggest pain for me is the stylesheet change.. I really don't have the energy to update my stylesheet to the new format.. ill post up and see if someone fancies doing it for me (for a small fee of course!)

I am more than willing to create styles, I won't charge much so long as they're something basic (if I have to completely create somethign from scratch with no starting paramaters I may charge a smidge more lol)