I've played around with a few such as simple machines and I think that ubb is the best. I've heard bad things about VB. What forumware shocked you?

And please tone down your negativity and if you don't like the company then go with another one.

I suggest you don't mistake frank opinions from a long-term customer for 'negativity'. It's not a case of 'not liking the company'. I think I made that clear before. Too bad if you don't like my opinions.

I am going with ipboard. I have been playing with it for the last 5 days and I am amazed at how far advanced it is over ubbthreads. It doesn't give me any pleasure in saying that as it is going to give me a lot of work, but I'm excited at the upgrade I am about to take. But like I said I feel a bit silly now for not looking sooner. I always believed that version 8 would just be great, and be with us like last year. But now that I have spent the time looking elsewhere, I have seen absolutely nothing that shows me that even Verion 8 will be anything on - for example - what ipboard is offering.

Never even heard of "simple machines". In my original searches over the weekend that name never came up as a major player.

is there an importer available for ipboard?

I suppose it isn't good form to really go on about it here, but... yes.

dam it looks expensive, after adding up everything it came out to almost $300. No thanks, and the look and feel of it is very bland.

Agreed... For note, this isn't really a good place for dropping info about competing software; that's a bit "stab you in the back"-ish...

I suppose I'm just 'rich' then.
Don't know about you, but my Forums are worth way more to me. I don't mind paying for quality and features.
Calling that bland and then looking at this Forum? Now that raised a chuckle.

Yes, Gizmo, I was aware of that, sorry.... ShiftKnowledge asked.
Please delete as necessary if feel the need.
Thank you.

Though for some reason it doesn't say so, I am also an 11+ year UBB user, supporter and lifetime licensee. I also have credits enough to have had Rick do the upgrade to get the nearly million posts on my board safely and painlessly over into the new version which we've all been waiting for. I started my own org. with 60 people and have led it to over 50K members in 13 years and I can't imagine the pain it would put me through to let go of it for any reason, so we should all have some sympathy for Rick on this. This has been his baby and now he's handing it off. I wish him the best. It has to be gut wrenching.

I am also very worried about my own investment (not money, but trust) in this format/product because it's so critical to the 20K or so members (nearly 40% of my membership) and thousands of daily surfers by who visit my board. It's important in our industry to protect people from scam artists and misinformation and I worry that a new company may not even be able to offer the same updating and safety net for our data which is beyond critical for us. I am less concerned about the obvious PR gaffes here and more concerned that a new owner is letting some of his longest timed veteran users swing in the wind after posting his (or her) first name only and when seeing what is posted here, not coming back STRONG to quell our fears. I mean seriously, if you aren't worried about those folks who are the biggest apostles for the products name and reputation, what hope is there for everyone else? I've been promising and re-promising our members all these new and coming soon updates for way too long and I am geting heat now and it's hurting my own credibility. Perhaps I shouldn't have trusted the info and promises we were getting here, but I admit I made that mistake based on more than a decade long relationship.

So Mr/Mz Brooks, can you please step up as our new user community leader and holder of the future of our use of this critical tool and give us a bit of hope for the future? If Rick felt the need to come out with this info, I have to think that you as the new owner weren't blindsided by it. But you're really only fanning the flames here instead of at least communicating. And why the secret as to who you actually are? When a void of info so simply offered is there, people, by nature, fill in the blanks, often with the worst case scenario.

I don't like change. I don't even like changing our board from version to version any more than I need to. But the features that have been promised are also those being DEMANDED by my members and I am losing traffic to Facebook and other sites because I waited to update from the ancient version 7.02 until 8 was coming out because way back when Rick told me to just hang on and go with 8.0. That was perhaps more than 2 years ago.

Thanks for the assurances (which I finally found on page 2) that our lifetime memberships would be honored. I am hopeful that you'll also be sure to not only update our boards based on remaining support time in our account (which Rick had assured me of) but also you'll make sure that our older pages continue to show up in google searches now. We've had a terrible problem with version 5.xx pages coming up in their old format which is non working so that when important older info is found in searches, people can't reply or engage from that page at all. It's always been a train wreck I had hoped could be fixed when we jumped to 8.

Brooks may be the greatest thing ever to happen. But I hope there's a customer relations person who can step up and put out the negative energy which is building. It's sad to see Rick's labor of love getting trashed due to uncertainty by some and terror by others. Sadly, I confess and a complete non-techie, the latter applies to me.

Brian

Brian Austin Whitney
Founder
Just Plain Folks
www.justplainfolks.org

Interesting.

I am the Tech Slave for a community that has been together for 15+ years. Little over a year ago they were kicked out of their home. Funny because the new owner didn't understand them and went in thinking he could handle it and got trolled bad. We went with UBB because it was the first forum software that was used on the site.

Over the last year they have been asking for more functions/features. My golden rule is to never mess with the core code. Who knows a semi truck of USDA goat butts might overturn and kill me. Then they would have to deal with some pleb trying to figure out my hacks. However in order to give them what they want, I have had to add to and change core code. Functions that are available on other platforms. This brings up the problem of updating and having to backtrack and change things if they are replaced in the new version.

2 weeks ago I too started searching for a replacement. Found one that I liked and had the features that the community wanted. Wrote a importer script and dumped the old forums into it. Was in the middle of porting the skins over when I read about the new owner. I agree with sat4all I will be willing to hold on a little longer but not much more. The biggest draw for me on UBB 8 was hooks in the core code for plugins. I hate doing things twice.

As for Rick

AWSESOME DUDE!!!!11!ONE

Never needed any tech support but did notice he was usually around for others. Him, SD and Giz. The best of luck to you.

You might wanna check out IP.Board.
I tried the free demo and it is way ahead in looks, features and under the hood.

I am waiting the full two weeks, but if there is no response or the response is not to my satisfaction, I know to what forum software I am going to convert to.
The importer imports everything, except for permissions and gallery forums.

I think we are fully entitled to be a little skeptic and even negative. Before Rick threw his story on this site, the new owner should have had his story ready to post.