Welcome to the new AfterWorldForum

PRESENTING

The New AfterWorldForum

In August last year, after many months of planning, we made the switch from vBulletin 3.8.* to vBulletin 4. The license for that was bought back in November 2009, during a pre-sale event. When the product finally came out in January, it was a major disappointment to us, as many of the promised functionality was lacking, and the product was riddled with bugs.

Still, come August, the product seemed to have stabilized enough to upgrade and away we went. Spicing up the process by means of a storyline, a 12 hour upgrade marathon commenced. Shortly after completing, we started noticing the server slowing down, and we had no other real explanation other than this being the result of our upgrade. Search for vBulletin 4 also was a mess, and with IB (the company owning vBulletin) releasing updates at almost a monthly basis, we suddenly found ourselves forced to spend hours and hours every month attending to bug fixes and styling issues. Worse yet, with every update, new bugs were introduced.

Clearly, this was not a desirable situation, and we started looking around for alternatives. In fact, things were so bad that despite buying a license for vBulletin 4 for afterworldforum.com, we left it running the old (and now discontinued and unsupported) vB 3.8.6. Around that time, we first heard of XenForo, and decided to check it out. It turns out to be a very addictive forum-experience, and so that's what we decided we would settle for. XenForo has only been released in October 2010, and as such, not every piece of functionality that vBulletin offers is available yet, but this will undoubtedly improve over time.

As it stands, for the time being, we will be lacking the following features for a while:

• Arcade
• Gallery (You now upload pictures directly in your posts)
• Ignore lists
• Thread prefixes
• User profile customization

... as well as some other things that you undoubtedly will find that you might actually not miss that much anyway.

In exchange, though, XenForo (and a few additional add-ons we run) offers you the following abilities:

• Alerts - As seen on iPhones and FaceBook, an alert will be visible in the form of a little red icon at the upper-right of the screen, indicating there is something relevant to you (i.e. Someone you follow made an update, or someone quoted a post made by you, etc.).
• BB Codes - A plethora of BB codes is available in XenForo. To see an extensive list with instructions and examples, check under Help (from the navigation bar), and then BB Codes.
• Event registration - At the top, you will see a new Events tab. Event organizers can register events in there, and users can RSVP a spot in them.
• FaceBook integration - This is one of those features that was promised to be on vBulletin 4, but never fully got implemented in it. You can link your FaceBook account to your forum account, and "recommend" or "like" anything on the forum. It is also possible to use a FaceBook account to log on to our forum.
• Follow users - Instead of having friends, you can now follow people. Whenever your friend is doing something, you will be able to find it in your personal settings under 'News Feed' Like - Just like FaceBook. The like system replaces both the original reputation system, as well as the Gratz system. I will try and see if I can find a way to import old reputation messages. There is a plugin available for this, but I just have not had the time to test it yet.
• Moods - It is possible to select a mood to indicate what mood you are currently in. You can do this (among others) from your profile page.
• Report private conversations - Private messages have been renamed to "Private conversations". Should another member be disruptive, it is now possible to report such a message to the moderating and administrating team.
• Styles - Lykke has created an AfterWorld style - but you are also able to choose the default style.
• Twitter-like @user ability. I.e. you reply to a message by admin, by using @admin. I will then automatically be alerted of this (by means of the alert system) the next time I refresh a page.

There is a new Blogging functionality available in the new system as well.

Obviously, switching forum software is not a small thing, so there are bound to be some things we overlooked, as we are also still tweaking around in the system, adding small things all the time. Should you find something out of place, please let us know. You can report it in this thread, and we will try and address it ASAP.

Thank you for your understanding, sorry for any inconvenience, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy the new and improved AfterWorldForum.com.

Peter and Lykke

Please see if you can choose the skin *AfterWorldForum* in the bottom of this page to the left? We are not sure if it was visible for you guys yet :)

Thank you