Randy,

I have seen a number of posts that talk about upgrade/enhancements that the community want... but are not possible in the version of software FT is running.

How would you feel about a mini "electronic telethon" where members could make a one-time donation via paypal that would be used to purchase a newer version of the software?

I would be first in line to offer up such a donation and believe many others would as well. I spend a lot of time on this site... and want it to be the best possible.

Your thoughts?

William

I would give some money, too and think that most heavy-users would do also.

But if I where Randy I guess I wouldn't ask for money...

I'm in!

Jim Proud InsideFlyer Subscriber

100% in agreement.

In addition, I'd propose we move to a http://www.vbulletin.com/ based system.

If Randy wants to go that path I am in, but recall reading in a previous post from him he very much was against that concept on principle. Anyone who wants to support the group needs only to sign up for "Inside Flyer."

I think some do not appreciate what an essential sounding board FT is for Randy's various core businesses which employs dozens of staff, (of which FT is a pretty small side issue) and a fee free FT seems to fit nicely in that business plan.

If some Airline/Hotel client hires one of Randy's entities to consult on some aspect of what they are doing/might do/are thinking of doing these boards supply him knowledable and detialed input and feedback within hours. And that makes FT a valuable resource.

But as always I may be wrong.

Having admin'ed UBB in another environment, v. 5.47, which is what flyertalk is using, is about the best you can do at the moment. There are upgrades available, but from what I can tell they don't offer the types of features FT users are asking for. Version 6.4.0.1 and v.6.2.1 correct some small bugs, but don't offer any substantial changes to the UI.

I think we should stick with what's stable and wait for an upgrade that's worth switching to.

It's really not about the money, we spend plenty toward FT and will continue. While there are newer versions of the UBB software we use, the version we use is the last version that creates static HTML pages of posts for access. The newer versions create pages on the fly when someone accesses them and we understand from the folks that wrote the code for UBB that with our traffic, the newer versions may be slower, which is why we haven't upgraded though we do want to use some of the newer features. Bottom line - we're holding for the board performance for the good of members vs. getting too fancy. We still look at other available software from time to time but when stress testing them with our archive and traffic they don't perform as well.

Randy,

Thanks for your response... and the detail behind it.

Many of us are ready to provide a "gift" to help in any way possible... I don't need another subscription.

Thanks

William

Randy, have you evaluated vBulletin?

I have participated on another web forum, www.tivocommunity.com that currently has 93,777 threads totalling 914,300 posts from 28,464 members (67 new ones added today). They had very similar problems on UBB, and determined that they could not grow on UBB.

They made a conversion to vBulletin maybe 18 months ago and saw no degradation in speed, and offer a lot of very cool features that I've heard a lot of people on here ask about.

It does dynamically build pages, which allows it to squelch posters on your personal ignore list, size pages appropriately for your bandwidth, and even has buttons to take you right to the first unread post in a thread. It also offers sticky posts, which would be handy for education on appropriate topics/FAQ's for some of the forums.

I have no idea the licensing costs or technical specifics, but it seems to have been very successfully implemented over there, and I'm sure you could contact David Bott, the host of the forum for additional specifics.

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robb is clearly within the margin of sampling error - Googlism

Interesting approach, but probably wrong. Following the ole 80-20 rule, the logical way to do this is for the software, on a regular basis, to automatically pick the minority of threads that get most of the queries. Those get done statically for performance reasons and the rest are created dynamically to save memory. Optimize both performance and space, viola!

You get a musical instrument out of it?

FewMiles..

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robb is clearly within the margin of sampling error - Googlism

Well, no software is perfect...

They were down prior to starting the reindexing, so it looks like a full two-day outage.

I don't know if it was responsible or not, but I know that they were slashdotted late last week. I think that may have pushed the site over the edge. Any 1 million post message board is going to have some problems!

I second the vote for vbulletin. It is $160. I would definitely donate towards an "upgrade" to vbulletin.