[Xoxide_Owners]

Originally Posted by Judah

I'm new here (well, in posting anyways) and I have a legitimate question: is this the official Xoxide forum? I mean, is it owned and operated by Xoxide, Inc.?

I don't mean to appear rude, but if it is, it seems like poor form for a company to not upkeep forums that exist as a (free) service to their customers (current and potential). I mean, a company is not judged by shipping speed and product selection alone, or at least not in my book. At the very least, put some trust in the many MANY fine, longstanding admins who are lining up to fix things around here...

Unless of course, there is some technical obstacle in updating the forums, but even then, solutions can be found!

Welcome! That's exactly what we're doing and in fact are discussing in another post exactly how to best empower and equip our admins to better manage the forums! We can't spend quite as much time as we'd like overseeing everything, but we have great mods and are working with them to keep this a great community.

[Judah]

Hey there,

Thanks for replying. I had a previous account back in the mid 2000's and remember this to be a thriving, industry-leading community of modders. Living in Europe at the time, I never ordered anything from Xoxide, but remarked that there was an excellent synergy between the forums and the store proper. I remember wishing that shipping wasn't prohibitively expensive, as Europe was a little behind in the modding scene.

I came back around 2010, and in the past few years I think most people would agree (I've seen it alluded to several times) we have seen a bit of a slump. I'm not sure why, to be honest. Xoxide still offers excellent products at competitive prices, and the forum is still filled with helpful and friendly admins.

I think it's great that you're discussing the best way to proceed, using the strong team of admins and moderators that have stuck around. As I have mentioned, Xoxide is still a great website, and this community has a strong base - I don't think it would be too wild of a speculation to propose that spam and lack of updates to the forum in general might have something to do with it.

Speaking on a personal note, I would love to see some new life put back in to the aesthetics of the forum. A fresh new look and updated WYSIWYG/function buttons could do wonders, IMHO. I'm not one who thinks that a website should get a new theme every six months for the sake of trend, however speaking as a photographer, there is something to be said for the effects of aesthetics on a person's time spent with/on something.

Like I said, my post count doesn't amount to much, but I really have taken a liking (again) to this community and would love to see an influx of people not writing gibberish every night!

[Xoxide_Owners]

Thanks for the feedback! We want to see it thriving as well and appreciate all the suggestions!

[cyclonite]

So how viable is it to upgrade the vBulletin to vBulletin 5 Connect?

• Engaging social functionality
• Extensive personalization
• Real-time interaction
• Facebook integration
• Excellent moderation control
• Strong security
• World-class support
• Api Extension System

Just to point out the bullet items from vBulletins home page


I am not saying that it is the one stop fix, but it sure is a step in the right direction.

[furball zen]

^^^ That would be the easiest although ugly way to go followed by dumping VB for phpBB (free and super free support and mass plug-ins) but i think each way would be a bit of work.

[Judah]

Just took a look at vB5 and despite having some unnecessary features (IMO), it looks to be a very smooth set-up.

[Judah]

You know, one idea (my L4D clan did this one time) would be to use the (potential) upgrade as an excuse to get rid of spam accounts.

Send out a re-confirmation email, so people need to reactivate accounts to log in. Spammers/botnets don't monitor the emails they use to sign up for forums, so you'll lose some of the old ones. Just don't put a time limit on it so that people can still activate in a few months if they feel like it...

Just throwing out ideas here, feel free to ignore me :D

[cyclonite]

One way to stop the spam today would be to turn on admin approval for new registrations.

Sure its a PITA for the mods and admins, but then again there would not be 25 pages of spam every day

[furball zen]

^^^ By far the easiest. I dont have perms for that though.