Magnus' Ramblings

Okay, it's not every day that you upgrade a web site to a completely new version of the software that runs it but today I did. We went from vBulletin 3.8.4 to 4.0.1.

We've been using a system together with vBulletin that is called vbSEO and basically it rewrites URLs so they are more search engine friendly. See, search engines don't generally like to see "...threadid=123". Instead they like "123-i-bought-a-new-macbook". And that's what vbSEO offers, it rewrites URLs on the fly. And that's given us a pretty good standing in search engines.

We were also using something called vbAdvanced, which basically was a sort of portal/page system with which we could add static pages to our site. That was helpful in the beginning but it's lost its usefulness lately.

So in upgrading today there were multiple problems and most of them have been solved. What remains is really to figure out what vBulletin 4 has to offer - there are blogs, sections, etc.

I'm sure that with some patience and understanding from you we can make this an even better place to hang out than before.

Oh, and we're still working on getting a complete new look to the site but we felt we needed to go ahead and get up to latest software version first and let that change come later.