Where's OB?

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we recently closed OB so that we can move it to our shiny new server. That step is now complete and it went very smoothly (thanks to Adam for doing the move and Petie for doing the pre-move upgrade).

The next step is a little more complex and I thought I'd talk about it a bit here.

For those who have been using OB for years, you'll probably be aware that we've been using vBulletin for a very long time. vBulletin is the software that drives our forums.

What normally happens is that we pay an annual fee for a vBulletin license - in other words, we have to renew each year.

For various reasons, we have decided not to renew our vBulletin agreement this year. As a result, we've had to decide on an alternative software to power OB.

We're going to go with IP Board.

Because this is a big software change, it will take us a little while to make sure everything is set up correctly. So at the moment I'm expecting that OB will re-launch early next week.

Initially we won't have all the updated FAQs and things for the new features - it will take us a little time to put those things together. Also it is likely that we will launch with a fairly barebones type of layout, with a view to doing a bigger update shortly after re-launch.

So I hope this sheds a little more light on what we're doing at the moment. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to comment.

OB Downtime

Just in case you haven't seen my announcement at OB today, the site will be going offline sometime shortly.

This is because we are moving OB across to the new server (theO will follow during the week).

In addition to that, we are planning to migrate OB to a new software and that will take some time. When I have more details about this, I will let everyone know.

Please keep following this page for updates as we progress. If you have any questions you can also ask here.

End