Phil O'Keefe wrote:First of all, it's IT support. The old site has been having issues since September 2011. GC Corporate doesn't have a vB expert on staff to assist us. We've tried to hire a few different outside contractors, but as evidenced by the poor site performance over the past year or so, none of them were up to the task of dealing with a vB site as large and complex as HC. That's my perspective on it, and while I don't see all the corporate insider stuff, I think it's fairly accurate.
There's also the issue of servers. We would have needed more - a lot more. Plus the issue of spam and attacks there, which although you guys only saw a small percentage of that, it was killing our moderators dealing with all the stuff that was getting through to the moderation queues that they had to delete.
The contract with the company that was hosting half of the HC site - the part with the User Reviews, Industry News, Articles, videos, etc. was expiring, and we definitely didn't want to renew with them. Think HC 2.0 - those guys. Enuff said. And vB wasn't capable of handling that part of HC, so something had to replace at least that.
In a nutshell, it just wasn't practical from an operational standpoint.
Again, that's the part of it all that bothers me the most, and really makes me not want to hang around...
You people had no business buying this forum.
Some genius at GC Corporate had a stupid idea one day that they could buy a forum, utterly neglect it, spend no money on keeping it running (or as little as possible), and it would drive customers screaming to their doors to buy gear. They took what was a community for musicians, and tried to co-opt it in the name of profit. Obviously, it didn't work as planned, and now you are saddled with this stupid dying forum that has descended into chaos and uselessness (at your own hands, no less), that you probably paid way too much for, and you are looking to stick it in a corner somewhere, and try to ignore it (by handing the reigns over to Jive II to create and run).
You took something good, and let it go to pot, so that you could make a few extra bucks... even then, given YEARS to do something about it, you continue to offer cheap, unacceptable solutions, that only seem to benefit the company, as opposed to the users, time after time. After the last debacle, most here were pretty clear... no, I take that back... most here were unabashedly, brutally, and sometimes even cruelly honest with all of you about what they wanted.
This aint it.
If no one in your organization wants to do what is necessary to run this forum in a way that is acceptable to it's members, just stop. Shut it down. Sell it back to Lehman. Do something. Anything.
Think about it... seriously... everything that made this site attractive to you... the high traffic forums, years and years worth of user reviews, the sense of community... you've destroyed it all. Just give it up already.
ashasha wrote:
What I never will understand is why they couldn't have done something about the layout. vBulletin is not that complicated a design concept to emulate, especially given the time and flack after the first time HC2.0 was introduced. I mean nobody cares what the code is as long as it looks and behaves similarly.
As it stands it's just a lot more difficult to try and even read thread titles. And about 90% of people with computers have a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor. That's a lot of wasted real estate.
It was always our intention to rely heavily on input from the moderators and the forum community as we were laying things out here. We definitely wanted to have everything designed, refined, and fully tested before launch. I'm right there with you insofar as the overall look of the site and emulating the old site. Craig and I have both repeatedly said that there would be objections unless the new site was as close to the old one as possible in terms of forum look and feel. Fonts, avatars and sizes, background shadings, emoticons, text color - it's all been mentioned.
Unfortunately, the old system conspired against us. It simply became so bad that it was for all intents and purposes, unusable. We were presented with a choice - and yes, I was asked for my input on this and I agreed with the decision to go live ASAP, even though the new site wasn't fully ready. It was either that, or continue to let everyone suffer on the ever-worsening old site - and even I couldn't access it or accomplish much on it half the time I tried.
At least people can post here without timeouts, database errors, and page hangs, and it's now all out in the open during the final development and refinement process, so everyone gets the opportunity to give their input on what the site is going to look like. Do I remember HC 2.0? I lived through that nightmare in ways, and for far longer, than any of you can probably imagine. 
Believe me, I'm well aware of the lessons from that. We're definitely trying to get your input. We moved here "early" so people could post. We know it's not fully ready. We said it wouldn't be before we launched. But we're working hard on fixing that.
You're right - it shouldn't be hard to do, but it will take a bit of time. And of course, the input from as many of you as possible, so please keep the feedback coming - it gives the mods and admins stuff to back up what we've been saying all along, as well as the design and Lithium teams valuable input that they can use to give you the look and feel you want, as opposed to what they're used to for their other customers, or what they think looks good.
Phil O'Keefe wrote:This is a combination of the Lithium recommended defaults and the untested / unvetted design work of the GC folks. Again, what we editors / admins wanted was to test it first before launch, and get the community's input via the mods and some well respected beta testers from the HC membership community. At that point, we would have had more to "back us up" insofar as what we were saying about the importance of keeping the design as close to the old one as possible, and those changes could have been made pre-launch - then everyone would have been happy at the official launch. That's what we wanted. What we were forced into was a early launch - and that decision (which definitely wasn't made lightly) was entirely due to the dysfunctional condition of the old site. At least from my perspective.
Again, while we have always wanted a mobile app or something to make things better for mobile users, we're not about to give up main site functionality just to get a better mobile experience. While I do have an iPhone, and just got an iPad, I spend far more time on a laptop or desktop machine than I do using either of those, so I'm not about to be in favor of anything that degrades the desktop user experience just to make the mobile one better.
I think you're getting plenty of feedback 
As I said, this is way better than HC 2.0 could ever have hoped to be and it does have some very obvious advantages over vB.
Just consider the complaints regarding compressing the readable space to the middle. I'm assuming that the reason for that is ads on both sides?
I run a good ad blocker so I never see ads, which probably why it looks so weird for me having all that empty space on the screen.
Ads at the top and bottom of the screen should be enough surely - or even just at one side and increase the useable area accordingly?
Originally Posted by mdrake34
ambient wrote:
You talk like you think the mods either work for GC, or are otherwise paid for what they do.
They don't/aren't.
They're all volunteers who do an excellent job, especially Phil.
I realize that. However, everyone who "works" on the forum, be they paid or volunteer, does so at the behest of GC. They may just be "carrying out orders," but they do so of their own volition. No one forces any of them to stick around and have their good names besmirched by the poor decision making of their superiors.
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