The site will be upgraded to vBulletin 4 early Friday morning PST. I plan to get started on it sometime between 4AM and 5AM PST. Here's what you can expect. The forums are still vBulletin, though the style/skins are done differently. The first order of business for me will be to get the base S2 skin and then the NBA team forum skins done. Blazers should be done by 9AM PST if all goes as I expect. The forums will have this kind of look/feel, with the red detail and the RipCityTwo.com banner at the top. The buttons are different, and may not be proper color right away. The Warriors forum will have the nice color scheme and banner it has now, as well. The quotes in posts look different, but IMO nicer. We may lose a few features like Forum Rules and Top Posters, but those will be added back as soon as I can get to things like that. The posting of youtube videos will not work immediately, but is on my short list to get done on Friday. We will be adding flash chat, so people can IM style or IRC style (chat room) chat with each other. We will be adding a few other nice features, like integration with facebook and twitter. The upgrade is not just to the forums, but to the home page and adds several new nifty features that I hope we'll all enjoy. For example, we each can have our own blogs (sorta like having your own personal forum, without having to pay for a supporting membership!). There is also an articles system, which I think we can put to good use (to replace info in some of the stickies). Another big new feature will be the SEO friendly URLs. This will get us a much better search engine ranking and help bring new members to the site. I participate on another site for my job that recently upgraded from vb3 to vb4 and there were a handful of small technical issues that were easily resolved over just a few days. My plan is that I'm taking off work on Friday and Monday which gives me 4 full days to get everything to a state we're happy, and I have full confidence that the upgrade will go quite smoothly. Why now? We just added a new admin who's already doing wonderful things for the site, and the new features enable him to do even bigger and better things. I have plans to write a bit of custom software for the site, and that effort would be wasted on vb3. Plus I think we'll all just enjoy the site a whole lot more. If you have questions, feel free to ask in this thread. -- Denny ______________
