Some vBulletin 2.x things:

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1

  1. Has the minimum Search word length changed to 4 characters, or did Jerry make an overagressive “badwords.php” file (I e-mailed about this)? I don’t think it was 4 characters before, since I thought ‘coal’ used to be searchable.

  2. Are you going to keep the ‘washed-out’ smilies? If you don’t care for them yourselves either, you can replace them with the Version 1.x smilies pretty easily (and legally, according to the vBulletin folks).

  3. Will you be adding the display of number of simultaneous Members/Guests on the main page again?

  4. I can show you quickly how to change some things, if you want (remove the auto-sig, etc).

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Hmmm…as I look around, I see that there are a lot of subtle issues still in progress. I only intended to list some things as questions/suggestions for reference.

I am dismayed to see that Polls didn’t make it in as a standard feature, however, maybe you guys are waiting before enabling them so I’ll just wait and see myself.

3

I noticed the polls weren’t what I expected on your ** UnaBoard site http://www.coalgoddess.net/forums/ **

When you start a vBulletin poll, you get to see the thread without having to vote in the poll. The (late, lamented) Roundtable polls required that, so that everyone had to vote before they saw what others had to say. It encouraged voting, and thus encouraged polls.

4

Yes.

Yes. (Thank you for the info. about using vBulletin 1.x smilies).

We have no plans so far to do that. No one seems to have asked for it.

Thanks for the offer. I don’t know how this thread escaped my attention for so long. If ever I start beating my head against the wall I’ll drop you a line.

5

We are still going over some of the new features and discussing when/how to implement them.

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Well, if you’re ever board one night, i’d like to see that again (no hurry, take care of everything else first) if you want to.

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Before implementing Polls, do check with Una and also drop a note to Navigator (who is a member here and an Admin. over on Pizza Parlor) or MouseJstr (tech. guru over on PP). I recall some major glitches when PP instituted the Polls feature (which was before I got into the moderation end of things over there), and I’m sure they’d be glad to let you know what pitfalls there are and how to avoid them.

I can fully understand why you don’t want to devote the bandwidth to avatars, but I found they added a lot to the “feel” of people’s online personas, and do not cost inordinate bandwidth. I’d like to suggest that you contemplate reviewing that idea when you get time to handle non-essentials.

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Thank you for the advice Polycarp. Anthracite has already given us some helpful suggestions and we may call on her in the future to gain the benefit of her experience with vBulletin 2.0
I would hesitate contacting other people before they say themselves that they are willing to offer their expertise.

Polls, avatars - some of the new features we are waiting until later to implement, and some we may never implement. In my opinion, what constitutes the value of the SDMB is the content of the posts themselves, from a varied and intelligent group of posters, and not the additional frills, so I probably don’t see as much value in the extras as others do. It might also reflect my age (having started with character-based terminals and newsgroups). I have yet to say “those darn young whippersnappers and their newfangled contraptions” but I’m getting closer to it every day. :wink: