As most of you know, there's been a forum upgrade looming over our heads for awhile now (I've been quietly working on it in the background for months now). Things have been going really well, and I believe we'll be going forward with the upgrade in the next couple days.

We'll be moving to the Xenforo software platform. The company that owned vbulletin (our current software) was sold some time ago. Shortly thereafter, most of the team that created the software found themselves unemployed. They gathered themselves together, and created a new platform, called Xenforo. While Xenforo is new, it's been created by those same people, that I would call the most experienced in their field. They were able to take everything they learned, and start all over. I believe they've created the best forum platform ever.

Forums as most of you know them, are often filled with features that have been created by third party developers (kinda like apps for a smartphone, although a bit more tricky to install). Xenforo has been very popular with these third party developers, and some of the more known names have went to Xenforo development exclusively. Upon our initial move to Xenforo, you'll probably notice that many of the features you're accustomed to are no longer there. Once i'm convinced all is well with our core forum, i'll begin adding these features back in one at a time, so that I can better isolate any problems that may arise. We'll likely be using a mix of third party add-ons, and some custom stuff i've written myself. A few of the add-ons currently ran on our vbulletin forum are listed below.

Our homepage, arcade, chat, chatbox, itrader, reviews, recipe section, gallery, and the rss reader.

There will be problems with the review section when we move. This add-on has been mostly abandoned by it's creator. I expect it to be broken in the move, and i'm still looking over the best method to replace it with something that will not leave us in this position again.

I expect the upgrade to take hours, maybe the better part of a day. The new software is already installed, but moving the member list, and posts will take some time, and I can't start that process until the vb forum goes offline. Hopefully i'll have a better idea on time once I get started. Unexpected things can certainly happen, but i'm doing everything possible to limit that possibility.

I'm really excited about this move. Xenforo is a very modern piece of software. In my opinion, vbulletin really looks dated compared to the rest of the internet (especially our 3.8 version). I've been around it so much I really didn't notice it until I started working with Xenforo. You'll notice faster, smoother pages. When you do something in vbulletin (like make a post), a page load is required to see your new post. With xenforo, you make a post, and it slides into it's position without reloading the entire page. Things like this seem small, but they save time on loading, and save resources to the server.

For our new design, we didn't settle on anything. I've called in favors from around the world. You'll not see this design on any other forum, as it's truly custom and just perfect for us. It brings a rich feel, and certainly feels like "The Den" that we are. I'm really excited for you all to see the improvements.

:happy096 :happy108

Thank you for all the hard work, Sparky.

I hope we can all be patient and supportive during the upgrade.

The store, and any other TSD related websites will remain up.

If things continue going as well as they are, maybe as soon as tomorrow afternoon.