By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 11:00 am:

The NewTek Web site will be launching a complete redesign soon, and this includes new software for the forums. We will be using vBulletin, which means that long threads will be broken into pages, main topic areas and subtopic areas will all be listed on the main menu or accessible from a submenu, avatar images are allowed, and there is a username/password recovery feature so that you do not have to wait on the forum sysop for assistance in that situation.

Our web team will not be able to transport the current userlist to the new software, so you will need to set up a new account as soon as the new forums are online. The current forums will have all posting privileges turned off when the new forums are made active, and will be kept online as an archive. They will be edited to remove redundant questions and answers and obsolete or incorrect information.

See you soon, in NewTek's new and improved forums!

By Chris S. (Fez) (68.51.141.174) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 11:15 am:

Sounds awesome!

By Chris W. (Chriswork) (24.123.214.36) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 12:21 pm:

What's the ETA on this Chuck? This week? Next Month?

By Matt Clary (Mattclary) (208.255.196.62) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 01:28 pm:

Coolness!

By Juan J. Gonzalez (Juanjgon) (80.58.7.235) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 01:55 pm:

It sound cool ... hope it as soon as posible ;-)

Regards,
Juan J. Gonzalez

By Ernest Miron (Ernest) (196.40.0.106) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 02:20 pm:

With vBulletin we have to host our own images, right?

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 02:46 pm:

I'll be the party pooper and say I like the existing forums. I like the way that you can skim down all the postings in a thread in one go. It's quicker this way than having to always click for the next page. It's only on rare occasions that a thread becomes too long.

?When everyone has an icon or image next to their name it'll increase download times (much more than a long thread would have).

?Editing an archive of the existing threads would be a very time consuming task!

I like the old way, but I'll come back to the new one anyway.

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 03:37 pm:

When it comes to archiving, vBulletin does have a feature to view the thread in one go - select "Show printable version" and then you have an option to show all posts on the thread on one page.

By Jessica Vitale (Jvitale) (209.179.131.103) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 04:50 pm:

You mean you are going to make this forum look kinda like CG Talk and lw3d.org?...cool!

By steve (Prospector) (207.231.74.25) on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 08:13 pm:

Will LW vs Notepad be added to the NEW forum ??
We may want to continue it as it has been going for over a year now and it is probably the longest thread anywhere on the internet. Kinda like an antique that needs to be taken care of once in a while..

By Hawick Inkster (Lord) (210.86.90.77) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 12:58 am:

Yay! Such happiness and visual joy. Brings warm fuzzies to my belly. Can't wait.

By Ed Mag (Ed_M) (152.163.189.134) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 01:00 am:

My question is.. How many of the old Mac-LW discussions will be trashed? There were some threads about ScreamerNet and LW performance that involved some REALLY great discussion. I'm talking about the ones Involving Chris Cox from Adobe, Dean Dauger from Dauger Research, Ted Devlin and John C. Welch. Those threads SHOULD not be edited and left in their entirety, since they contain some valuable and interesting information. E-mail me at EdsLab2@aol.com with your intentions.

Thanks

--
Ed M.

By Hervé Steff (Hervé) (212.76.255.168) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 02:41 am:

So.... cool, when is it going to start..?

Thanks

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 04:40 am:

Hey, Ed. If you want to keep stuff from the old forum maybe you should save it yourself, quickly, while it's still there.

I don't know if it's necessary to change the format of the forums. It doesn't take that long for a single thread to load up. I hope we can still view current threads as a single page, as well as archived ones as Chuck mentioned.

Avatars and animated icons will make it pretty, but slow things down.

A boolean search feature would be useful though. At the top of each topic, rather than on the main menu. This would encourage people to search before posting a new thread about an old topic.

By Matt Clary (Mattclary) (208.255.196.37) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 07:05 am:

hahaha, that's funny Beam! Why search when you can ask? Some things you just can't break people of.

By Psyhke (Jbeck) (24.163.209.122) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 08:06 am:

I really don't think avatars will slow things down relative to the current system's performace. Images download separate from the page. The page will load fine without them. It's the page sizes (HTML) that's the problem with the current forums. Pagination is necessary for better performance. IMHO, it's ridiculous to have main forum pages list hundreds of topics at once, by default, and with no way to change it. Some of the category pages (General Support, LW Community) are in excess of half a megabyte- that's just the HTML code. That's way too much. (Let alone the actual message pages). That's why this forum can be quite slow sometimes.

I'm looking forward to the updated system.

By Andy Lackow (Craftmatic) (4.35.93.102) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 08:09 am:

It's about time. I visit this forum less frequently because it is so primitive compared to the many others that I attend regularly. NewTek has needed to do this for a long time. Good decision, Chuck & NewTek Team.

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 09:38 am:

Hi, Ed!

The type of discussions you mention are precisely the ones for which we are leaving the current forum available as an archive. I already made my intentions clear - redundant or obsolete information, and discussions such as you mentioned do not go obsolete. There are support and technique questions that were asked and answered repeatedly, there are also incorrect answers to such questions present, or theories about problems that turned out to be incorrect or incomplete. That is where we'll be able to edit and condense things, and in a lot of cases move material into the support FAQs as opposed to needing to leave it here.

Please bear in mind also - I don't have any idea how soon I would actually have a chance to work on the editing. In theory this was supposed to happen all along, as we did not want to do what many boards do, which is to simply set size limits or date limits on the board sections so that older material is automatically deleted when a limit is reached. In practice, we've only removed a few duplicated questions on a couple of occasions, and that's really mostly been limited to trimming out the CS Forum of Q's and A's that only applied to one person on a specific matter.

By Earl Wilson IV (Earl) (65.198.3.2) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 05:10 pm:

Hey Chuck, if I'm not mistaken, didn't NewTek redesign their website for the release of LW 7? Or was it version 6... hmmm, can't remember... or maybe it was for version 8...err... Oh such naughty thoughts!


Hehe, in all seriousness, I'm glad to see this! Although I like the uniqueness to this forum, it does lack some of the more advanced features... just *please* keep the forums visually simple! So many vBulletin's are so aweful in their messy, icon-nated layout.. reminds me of 3ds.. =)

Hey, there's an idea... forums designed to fit the LW interface!

By riki (Suture) (203.109.249.131) on Tuesday, January 21, 2003 - 05:43 pm:

Hi Chuck great to hear the good news. It's been on my wish list for a long time, so many thanks. It would be a good feature if we can subscribe (silently) and unsubscribe from specific threads. This would help stop a lot of infighting and give users the option of preventing unwanted mail.

I've been getting test images from one LW thread for about 6months ;-)

Many thanks

riki

By Ed Mag (Ed_M) (152.163.189.134) on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 - 06:39 pm:

Thanks Chuck. It's great that NewTek sees the value in such forum discussions. Chris Cox, Dean Dauger and John C. Welch (as well as a few other developers I know to be lurking here ;-) contributed very informative information and raised some interesting possibilities for the Mac Lightwave community. Still I probably should collect all those discussions before any of them accidentally disappear ;-) (just messn')

--
Ed

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (203.109.241.109) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 12:37 am:

I wonder if it might be worth changing the discussion topics of the new forums.

Specifically, sections where people discuss "how to" do something tend to be frequented by newbies. Although there are always some experienced people who are kind enough to answer the questions, most of the old pros don't go to these areas.

Maybe it would be better for newbie questions to be mixed up on the other topics. They're more likely to receive an answer that way.

By Chuck Baker (Cbaker) (207.235.86.2) on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 03:31 pm:

Ed, LOL!

An extra archive is always a good thing, though - one of the major pains was the server crash that lost our original forums a couple of years back, which had some great stuff that I would dearly have loved to have kept available, in particular in that case as well some very substantive discussions in the Mac section. Our backup facilities failed us back then, and that situation has been greatly improved but still, the more backup, the merrier...

Chuck