Let me give you a slight insight into the technical challenges of this site.
Christianforums.com runs on a version of vBulletin, from memory 3.7.6. I could be wrong about the final point, but I'm fairly sure it's 3.7.x, none the less. vBulletin is currently at vB 4.2.x.
The disparity in versions now starts to make things exceedingly hard. It's operating on an old computer - think, for example, running your home computer on Windows 2000 - not an idea many people would like to grapple with. It's old, it's outdated, and there's not much that actually is made to work for it anymore. And indeed - you'd actually have some issues finding people who even knew how to fix it if you had a problem. You'd probably just be told to upgrade to Windows 7 - but you can't, because you've got programs on here that only work on Windows 2000.
Now, you could change those problems over. With time, with lots of money, and lots of effort - but on a site like this, with advertising, time is literally money. Every second they're not serving ads means that there's a reduced opportunity to make money from the ads, because people can't click them.
The other issues is the database. Working off a few rough head calculations, and some average guestimations from server details I've seen over the years, equivalent database size, images stored, and a little bit of black internet magic, we can roughly estimate the database of Christianforums.com as somewhere near
twenty gigabytes.
For reference, that's quite a lot. 30 CD's, for that matter. Thing is, since CF runs on 3.6.x, and the new software runs on 4.2.x, there was a database change in the process of switching from vBulletin 3.8.5 to vBulletin 4.0.0. This basically means that they shuffled around some of the things, optimized others, and broke some other stuff that they tried to fix, and never quite recovered from.
Imagine taking the index for a encyclopaedia, and re-writing the index in French, and also changing the language structure of the English in the encyclopaedia. That's what they did with the database. So now you've got to translate all of the old into the new. That's what the major challenge with updating CF would be. There's
twenty gigabytes of information to change and re-allocate into a new format. That's a LOT of processing power needed. That's a long time for all that processing power to finish doing all of it's conversions.
Remember how I mentioned that every second the site isn't displaying ads, it doesn't make money? Yeah. Here's the major kicker. To update that database to the new version, there's two options.
- Turn the entire site off, and convert the database. This could take days of computational power. That's days of lost income.
- Make a complete copy of the site. Run a background copy of the website, which is being actively converted. Meanwhile, keep the original (old version) running till the conversion of the copy is complete, at which point you swap them around, and people get all annoyed because they lost 20 posts from when the copy was made that didn't carry over into the new website.
CF
has actually tried to upgrade before. That was a fiasco that lasted two weeks - mainly because it turned out that someone
forgot to do a backup before trying to roll out an upgrade on the live version of the site (Protip: Dumb idea of the week), and let's just say that the amount of modifications on this version of 3.7.x that we have
really didn't take well to being converted to the new system. Boom. Dead CF.
So we rolled back to 3.7.x and we've never moved anywhere since. We're still on the same system that we were when I was on staff, when I was posting a thousand times in a day. There's been no changes, there's been some minor security upgrades (and I mean seriously minor - the .htaccess passwords from back when I was on staff are still the same...), and they've tried to patch things together to keep them working.
Blessings spiralled out of control with two users, me and another that I won't name. Both of us got dumped with huge numbers of blessings - I'm talking the same number that're probably on the top ten blessings charts right now totalled up, just to
each of us. That destroyed the currency right then, and started causing problems because now you had larger integers floating around in the databases. We also topped out the limits of the algorithm that was responsible for blessings - the algorithm for vBulletin was never meant to support reputations in the trillions. That was stupid. It was propagated by the rep exchange threads, again with me and a number of other power users (some staff, others not), dropping huge amounts of blessings in counting threads, and basically levelling up exceptionally fast. We hit the limit of the algorithm, and then it broke, and stopped increasing anything, so they patched a different algorithm in there (I think a 32 bit algorithm as opposed to a 16 bit algorithm, from memory - I was off staff by this point in time). In doing this, other things broke.
Living avatars have always had issues as long as I've been around. It didn't ever really work reliably, the blessings were over-inflated for the prices even then, and nothing really clicked into place. Jobs were ridiculously under-paid and over-requirements, and there's probably a handfull of us with this many posts who actually have a crown as their job symbol - not that there's a description for the jobs, anyway.
There's a myriad of things that're broken for this site before they even start to think about fixing blessings. Take the login system - if you input a wrong password, it returns this:
To point it out, that should show SOMETHING out of five, not nothing at all.
This place carried me through a pretty chaotic time in my life. I've made friends here that I've flown across oceans to meet, and will love with all my heart for as long as I live. I've made friends, lost friends, made connections, and kept them. I've moved in circles of people that shake mountains when it comes to influence, built a circle of people around myself that are incredibly influential. And it couldn't have happened without CF.
I could fly over to the states, and have a couch to sleep on if I asked. Canada, Philippines, England, Thailand, Australia. All over the world. Has everything been worth the chaos on CF? Yep.
But none of us come here now. It's not worth it. We have other websites, other hobbies, other places to go. I run a website now. So do two of the other people that used to be movers and shakers here. It's moved with the times and it's evolved and it's still healthy and up to date, and it works.
Change is a necessity sometimes. Sacrificing a little bit of money sometimes is too. CF, it's time to get your butt into gear and make some changes. I know exactly how hard it is to move websites and keep all the data. Me and my admins have manually re-written thousands of posts to databases before to keep it. Deal with it. Hard work. Get over it. Sometimes you've gotta do it.
Sort out your upgrades. Make a shadow copy of the site, dump half the database, concentrate on upgrading to a stable, working, viable piece of forum software. You're the 28th biggest forum in the world. Start acting like it. Start sowing money, and you'll reap a growth.
It's basic biblical principals. Have some transparency. Be accountable to those you lead. Don't wash the outside of the bowl, but not the inside. This site doesn't need an external revamp, it needs an internal re-working of the system.
Stuff it. This post was a lot longer than I initially planned. Oh well. Sometimes, it needs to be. Pauler, get it together. Get your advisors doing what they're meant to be doing - working on the site. Get your information management team doing what they should be doing - whatever that is, no-one's quite sure, not even me who wrote the training manual that apparently has staff descriptions in it.
The relevance is slipping, and so is this site. It's got more stable, but it's just scaffolding propping up a building that's structurally unsound. Get some engineers in. Hire some programmers. Downsize. You can afford to lose some posts that're ten years old. Strip it out, start again with a post base that cuts off five years ago, strip out your inactive members, drop the reps and blessings tables and start again. Delete the archived threads that no-one's meant to have access to that just sit there taking up space under the staff forums. You don't need it. Clear out the old avatars, profile pictures, all of that - clear it away from the image servers that sit behind all of this bloated with the history of years gone by. You only need the two most recent from any accounts anyway.
This site can come back. It actually can - it's still got enough traffic and revenue coming from the adverts that run here to do something worthwhile. But please don't let it slip anymore. I may not be active here much, but I know people that are, and they deserve better.
I think it's about time to end this post. But if you've got questions, let me know. I'm happy to answer, both to staff and non staff members, open and closed communication. That is, if I remember to check back on things.
A.