Hi guys ... I wanted to mention this in the PFI thread because I think it spoke to the issue at hand and I wanted to provide some information about what we are doing to fix certain issues of which we are aware. Specifically, vB allows the automated tracking of moderator warnings and vacations etc, which will go a long way to helping cut down on the workload our moderators have (currently we manually track all warnings and violations) -- and this will help to improve the experience for members and moderators alike.
I didn't really want to talk about it publically until I had something more to show you on it though. Some have pointed out that vB has an importer for FT, but this is for FT2 and not FT3 -- in addition we have customized our FT package to the point where we can't rely on their import feature and we must write our own software.
This is currently in development but we do not have a timeline and it may be a long process.
We want to make many changes including refining the way we manage and moderate, and to that end, we required some tools that, at this point in time, FuseTalk does not include. There are also some security issues that I'm not willing to discuss at this point that have also prompted our desire to move to a different forum package.
As for look and feel, it is my goal to make the new forums as clean and professional looking as possible. We haven't even started working on the UI yet as this will happen after we know our data can make it successfully into vB ... if you read into that a bit you'll see I'm hedgeing a bit there -- we may hit a problem that prevents the move from happening, but at this point things look certain enough for me to be comfortable talking about the fact that we are working on this.
As for what you guys need to know, we will do our best to import all the threads we currently have, archived and otherwise, as well as member info and post counts. We will keep as many avatars as we are able to (some of the avatars we have aren't exclusive to FT). We will try to minimize downtime when we eventually do try to switch, but at some point before that we will have a semi-closed beta open by invitation only ...
anyway that's about it for now.