2022 is the year for upgrading MLU Forum

[Hanno Spoelstra]

All,

It has been a long time coming, but Geoff's son Shawn Winnington-Ball and I are (finally) going to work on migrating the forum to a newer version of the software and to a new server. Both the hard- and software are outdated and need to be upgraded for improved robustness and security.

To minimise our work load, I have temporarily suspended new registrations.

We will be staying with the vBulletin software - see https://forum.vbulletin.com/ for the look and feel of vBulletin v5 (we are cuurently using v3).

Please post your suggestions and comments in this thread, we're always considering improvements.

Thanks!

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[Matthew P]

No suggestions from me. Just kudos and know that we will be patient with you through the transition.

Matt

[m606paz]

Great!! Forums need upgrading!

[Robin Craig]

My only comment, thank you for doing the work to make it happen.

[Phil Waterman]

Thank you for all your efforts to keep MLU rolling along.

Cheers Phil

[Bob Carriere]

........ will there be a need for additional financial support from users???

At the price of monthly magazines today MLU is a bargain and offers a unique source of information and camaraderie.

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Just talked to Shawn tonight to discuss the migration plan he set up. It looks good, next step for him is to contact vBulletin to make arrangements for a test environment to be set up. This means we will migrate a copy of the database of this forum and set it up to use the new front end (the part which you see and use through your PC / laptop / mobile device). We will then test to see if the functionality we are used to works as it should.

For this testing I am looking for a couple of members to log onto the test environment and go about doing your thing as you usually would. So do a couple of searches, start a new thread, reply to an existing one, attach a few photos, send a PM, etc. I will look at the admin side of this and Shawn and vBulletin will tackle the technical stuff.

Who can help? Please send me an email if you are willing to spend a few hours testing the new software and share your experiences.

If all looks good after testing, we will do the final migration. This means that the current version of forum will be taken down for a few hours - maybe even a full day - for the then current database to be migrated, the software to be set up and for the new version of MLU to go live.

I will let you know the date for that well in advance, so you can plan and spend your day in real life as Shawn suggested So instead of gazing at your computer screen you can take your significant other out for dinner, go out dancing or see a movie. This will earn you loads of brownie points to be spent on many hours on the new & revamped MLU.

Stay tuned,