While I will not get into all of the reasons now for the move I will say my decision was not based on the forum subject matter. I feel that the lack of postings from long time CADO users played a bigger part. I had other problems with the forum that had nothing to do with the content. One problem and maybe the biggest was the software I was using for the forum. As many of you may recall I had planned on an update to the site before Hurricane season started this year and I had completed most of the upgrade and had even changed the server software to work with the planned update. The update had been in the works for over a year and some may also recall a few trial releases, remember the beta site? I may have been a little quick in April when I upgraded the main site but as I stated I wanted to get it done before Hurricane season started. What kept me from going a 100% at time was the new version to the forum software that would work with the main site was not released, this update had been promised by the vendor but did not come, and it was to be out in the first quarter of 2006. So the update, while 80% complete was put on hold pending the release of the forum software. The new release date was to be sometimes before the end of summer, this per the vendor. It never came. The last word from the vendor was that it would be out before the end of the year but it did not look very positive to me that it would happen. By this time I had already tested other forum software that would work well with the main site. It is very important to me to get the whole site on the same page as it relates to registration, login and user interactive areas. With over 10,000 users most of my time was spent dealing with registration and login problems. However, believe it or not the forum only accounts for about 1/3 of the activity on the site.
While you may not notice it now there will be many benefits to the members as a result of the recent change form a user database which was depended on forum software to a core user database which is not depended on a stand alone application. CADO is a home grown site. When I first started the site I wrote all of the code behind the CADO pages and even wrote the main apps at that time myself. These included the On the Road, Roster, On Standby and Resume hosting pages. I was proud of the apps and did not want to let them go. However, over time it became harder to keep these old apps working as the site grew and received more activity. They will now receive a long over due upgrade.
The timing was due several things, the lak of hurricane activity, the recent decline in activity in the old forums and the announcement from the software provider about another delay in the software release are just a few.
As far as a lack of post in the new forum there ready is not much of a decline when you look at the average number of post made in the last 30 days, the new forum is averaging about the same. However, as a webmaster I expect some decline when a change like this is made. As Gale pointed out in one of his post this is the fourth change in forums that I have made since I first created the site in 1995. There are other reasons, for example some people still have not made it to the new forum, they only visited the forum using a “Today’s Post” bookmark and may not realize that the forum has been moved, to them it just looks like no one is posting. Some users may have elected to leave due the changes in the forum, I expected this and I understand this.
As far as being soft, I guess I have grown a little softer, because it seems that I was seeing more insults of CADO members and of CADO in other forum over last few months.