Monsta_AU
...can I interest you in some vintage blades?
Staff member
Forum Administrator
Grand Society
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2011
- Location
- Guildford.nsw.au
After previously refusing to accept any donations for the site, I have now decided that I am in a position to do so.
I have decided to accept donations at this point as we need to make serious efforts to migrate the forum software to a better vendor. Our current forum software (vBulletin) which is going to cause us issues moving forward. The software is losing market share rapidly, the V5 release is extremely buggy and developers are leaving the platform in droves.
Some reasons to change forum software:
Although vBulletin still has ~69% of the paid forum software market, 46% of VB installs are still at version 3.x, which means they have no real reason to upgrade or are being held back by issues with later versions. The software is stagnant and is dying. This means that of all the forums that change forum software per month, 75% of those changes are from vBulletin to XenForo.
Add to this the security exploit used against our site in October and I personally have had enough. I am planning to move to XenForo. The two developers for XenForo actually developed vBulletin previously and are making massive strides with new point releases coming out every 3-4 months. Version 1.3 is due to be released in the next couple of months.
I have another project underway to build another forum which is not related to P&C (or shaving) in any way - just noticed a big gap in the market worldwide, but I am hoping I can gain some serious traffic to that site from the local market and a bit from overseas. That will drive advertising income which is needed and help both sites become self sufficient. It will be built with XenForo from scratch and will provide a platform to test the migration of Paste & Cut to the new software. There will also be a need to purchase a Virtual Private Server elsewhere to bolster the network, plus some other services like backup, DNS hosting and a few other bits. While this is not highly expensive, it does have a regular monthly cost.
I have looked at my finances and while I can support the monthly costs for now, the cost of licences for software is outside what I can do in the short term. So I am putting out the call to you all - I know many have offered to put your hands in your pocket before and those offers have been deeply appreciated.
If you want to put some money in, that would be appreciated. At this stage, donations are completely voluntary and would be preferred via bank transfer although other options may be available. Please send me a private message to get the details.
I have decided to accept donations at this point as we need to make serious efforts to migrate the forum software to a better vendor. Our current forum software (vBulletin) which is going to cause us issues moving forward. The software is losing market share rapidly, the V5 release is extremely buggy and developers are leaving the platform in droves.
Some reasons to change forum software:
- Version 5 of vBulletin is buggy and quite expensive - not an option to upgrade like YKW did;
- Plugins that our site relies on (vbSEO) is now abandoned and cannot be fixed or updated;
- Our previous theme vendor has abandoned maintaining their themes for vBulletin versions, or creating new ones;
- Security issues are rife - vBulletin had their own forums hacked a few months back;
- There is no vision at vBulletin to fix the current issues, nor a plan to develop the software and make it better.
Although vBulletin still has ~69% of the paid forum software market, 46% of VB installs are still at version 3.x, which means they have no real reason to upgrade or are being held back by issues with later versions. The software is stagnant and is dying. This means that of all the forums that change forum software per month, 75% of those changes are from vBulletin to XenForo.
Add to this the security exploit used against our site in October and I personally have had enough. I am planning to move to XenForo. The two developers for XenForo actually developed vBulletin previously and are making massive strides with new point releases coming out every 3-4 months. Version 1.3 is due to be released in the next couple of months.
I have another project underway to build another forum which is not related to P&C (or shaving) in any way - just noticed a big gap in the market worldwide, but I am hoping I can gain some serious traffic to that site from the local market and a bit from overseas. That will drive advertising income which is needed and help both sites become self sufficient. It will be built with XenForo from scratch and will provide a platform to test the migration of Paste & Cut to the new software. There will also be a need to purchase a Virtual Private Server elsewhere to bolster the network, plus some other services like backup, DNS hosting and a few other bits. While this is not highly expensive, it does have a regular monthly cost.
I have looked at my finances and while I can support the monthly costs for now, the cost of licences for software is outside what I can do in the short term. So I am putting out the call to you all - I know many have offered to put your hands in your pocket before and those offers have been deeply appreciated.
If you want to put some money in, that would be appreciated. At this stage, donations are completely voluntary and would be preferred via bank transfer although other options may be available. Please send me a private message to get the details.