Welcome To CinVin!

Welcome To CinVin!

For our older CinVin community members you will have noticed already that we are relaunching with a totally fresh start! For our newer CinVin community members we welcome you and look forward to talking.

With the fresh start comes fresh opportunities. The new CinVin community will be shaped around our community members interests and activities. Tell us what you want to see!

From the old site the user accounts and private messages have been imported. The old forum threads will not be imported.

Honestly, it was a hard decision to actually make & do considering that I've been with vBulletin since around 2003 or so. The bottom line solution can be summed up as "vBulletin 4" as to why I'm switching.

From the very first betas that were available there were issues with the new vB4 styling system and those issues were mostly ignored by vB. It is why some of the big power players in the vB style market stopped work on vB. From a coders perspective they then made a mistake by switching their versioning system so that even a minor point release could have major style & code changes that break 3rd party add-ons & hacks. That caused some major chaos as now suddenly an add-on that worked perfectly with, just for example, vB 4.0.7 was now broken after the vB 4.0.8 update. Point releases should not be having major changes. Again, we (the people who were releasing add-ons for vB) spoke up and were ignored. Then there is the recently introduced new editor, again introduced in a minor point release, that broke add-ons and was not exactly stable in the product itself. The current vB owners are introducting new features & products but yet bugs that have been reported since the 4.0.0 beta versions are still present. Combine all that with some pretty major security issues that have required patches along with a seemingly oblivious staff not listening and I finally have had enough.

I have an immense investment in vB as a customer with both time & money (some day if my wife ever finds out my 'web stuff budget', I am so dead) so deciding to make a clean break was something that I've been wrangling with for a bit. I loved the vB 3.x series and was hoping that if I waited it out that the vB 4.x series would eventually be just as solid but I just don't see it happening.

So why XenForo?

Over the years I have played with a lot of different forum packages, most of the free ones along with the vBulletin and IPB. For various reasons the free ones never caught my attention enough to warrant me switching from vB. When it came time for IPB I went gung-ho into that community, picked up several licenses for the various products, and put it through its paces. In the end I couldn't get over the feeling that while several innovative features & concepts were to be found in IPB it felt like somebody was trying to put a new paint job on a tank in order to call it a sports car. Even from a users perspective there are some cool features to play with but to me the GUI is a clunky, heavy design that keeps getting worse when new features are tried to be jammed in there.

That is where Kier & Mike got the right idea. Instead of trying to bolt on modern parts to a tank (IPB), or trying to rebuild the car piece by piece into a new design (vB4), they took the approach of starting with a blank piece of paper and designed their sports car to be a sports car from the get go. That meant building on a framework that is pretty adaptable (Zend framework), that meant putting SEO design elements into the style creation at the beginning instead of an after thought, and it meant going back to the drawing board to ask what are the elements that are truly needed to promote forum discussion.

But what really convinced me was that for the first time in a number of years I am actually excited again about working with forums as a hobby.