As one of the founding members of the original forum back in 2007 (8 years ago!) I want to personally thank Tim Dachtera, Vern Nanosky, and Rick Halldorson for the last 3 weeks dedication... whether meeting with me to discuss the future of the forum, doing research as to how we could "fix" things and get back to something that worked and was fun to use, and eventually testing a site we had up for a week... re-arranging, tweaking settings, and making sure everything was working, and helping make the unanimous decision to proceed with XenForo (the new platform this site is built on) ONLY to do it all again after we purchased our own XenForo license, have it converted, and start the process all over again! Dozens of hours go into making this thing look, and work like it does for all of our members to use.
Special thanks from me personally go to Tim Dachtera, who put up with my relentless "frustration" (putting it nicely) in an effort to make our old vBulletin platform work. In the end, it didn't happen. THAT WAS NOT TIM'S FAULT! The problem we a lousy platform that was not ready to be released when we bought it, and a company who did not seem to be interested in helping us fix it! Ask me sometime in person what I think about vBulletin! My thoughts are unfit for print here!
This forum platform seems to be working perfect! It has many cool features. We will unlock more of them moving forward as we all learn more. One thing that is easier than ever to do now is post pictures! No more 3rd party hosting, unless you want to do it that way. You can share photo's easier than ever now!
One down side, and one we could not avoid... while ALL of the old content is there, post counts and # of views of some threads is inaccurate. Many started over at zero. That is unfortunate when we have some very interesting, Blue Ribbon! threads that had in excess of 20,000 views, but that is one of the things we were unable to bring along in the conversion process. We apologize for that. We just couldn't avoid it.
I will be writing some "Tips and Tricks" threads with screen shots on how to use certain features as we move forward. They take some time to put together, so just watch for one to show up from time to time. I will post them in the site questions forum.
I also would like to thank Jerry Christiansen and Clayton and Jane Larson for their input getting this site running. They were part of the test team of the "beta" site. We selected them because they regularly contribute to these pages. Their input as regular member /users was invaluable making some of the decisions we had to make!
Thank you all for being as patient as you were with our old, crippled forum! We know it was troublesome for many of you, and our participation showed that. Now that we have this new site up and running, we hope you'll come back and join in on the conversation and make this site even better than it once was!
Welcome Back!
