[FusionWeb] The Forum: Where We Stand, and What's Coming

[Will Farrington]

Many of you are already well aware of the critical role that the forum
plays in this project: from providing a place to toss ideas around, to a
dedicated source of support for users everywhere. I don't really need to
break it down for anyone: the forum is very central to what this project
does and in providing a venue for users to communicate with developers.

So where do we stand right now:

Threads: 5,775
Posts: 41,473
Members: 9,389
Active Members: 1,874 

With the exception of Active Members, all those other statistics include
what was imported from the previous two forums. Still, at the end of the
day, nearly 2,000 members who post actively is an incredible milestone
at this stage.

Rico is, of course, working away at the theme for the entire group of
web services, forum included.

A theme isn't all that you, as developers, moderators, and users have
asked for though. On the contrary, the past few weeks the Feedback forum
has been full of requests for new functionality and more. None of these
recent issues have been addressed yet, and that's left some people
disappointed.

There's a reason none of the requests have been done yet!

vBulletin 3.7.x branch is currently the main focus of development for
those folks, and not too long ago they released a private beta of this
release. What this means, for us, is that a significant upgrade will be
just around the corner: from Beta1 to Gold (final release) is bound to
be a little more than a month or two away.

A brief list of things in the ChangeLog is available here:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=249460

The plan, currently, is once vBulletin 3.7.0 reaches Release Candidate 2
status (historically, this is the last release prior to Gold) is to
upgrade the forum to the new branch. As a result, a fair lot of things
in regards to items like the Prefixes will need some re-working to make
sure they're compatible with changes vBulletin 3.7.0 will bring. As
such, when it comes time to upgrade the forum, it will likely need to be
taken offline for roughly half a day, in order to make sure all is
operating smoothly. At that time, any current moderators or developers
who are interested should be in #compiz-fusion-forum [1] to help test
for possible regressions.

No specific release date has been announced, but rest assured that once
a timeframe is made available, I will notify this ML about the time and
date for the upgrade.

Thanks,
wfarr

[1] This room doesn't exist yet, and please, no one go creating it now.
When the time comes, I'll create and register the room on Freenode. The
purpose for this being that those helping me test will be granted +v
(voice) by me so that they can speak while the room is +m (moderated).
This way, any curious users can listen in on the upgrade process and
check the channel for the status of how things are going, but such that
they don't interrupt those working on the upgrade.