vBulletin To IP.Board – A Short Journey

Cheyne Wallace is a Sydney based Monitoring / Platform Engineer and Availability Manager – http://www.cheynewallace.com
http://www.soundpunk.com is the SMF site mentioned in this article to be converted to IPB

A long time SMF user , iv been growing a community based on an Simple Machines Forum for many years, and I have to say, its been great.
SMF has never given me troubles, I had complete control over my styles and templates, wrote several mods my self without ever really needing to understand the core system.

Upgrading the platform was dead simple, login to your panel one day and it tells you a new update is available, click update, it pulls the files down, checks that it wont break anything and prompts you to continue, all in all about a 1 minute procedure. Simple, (No pun intended)

SMF is great, although like many, the time has come for my community to expand, we often have people writing full length articles and posting in the forum, only to have them be bumped back into oblivion and never seen again, either that or end up with 400 sticky posts which is just messy.

I need a CMS, I need blogging, I need to post articles, and host downloads properly not as attachments. Im not interested in messy Wordpress and Joomla bridges , despite the fact a Wordpress blog is exactly what I want, iv been down that path before and it always turned out messy.

Fast forward to about December 2009, im looking around for a new solution, iv been a fairly big forum user over the years and I was very aware of vBulletin and its standing in the web community.

I begin investigating vBulletin licensing, my eyes widen as I see a new product is being launched over at vBulletin.com – vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite
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Piracy and R18+ Games

So another game has been banned from Australia (Aliens vs Predator), and this time the developers are refusing to censor the content.

And I don’t blame them.

Why spend years developing and testing a game, finally deeming it ready for production only to have some narrow minded Government on the opposite side of the world tell you It needs to be re-edited so a 14 year old can buy it. I know what id tell them.
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Dear FireFox, Call Me When You’re Sober

Dear FireFox,

I wish I could say this to you in person although I fear that I may not be able to go through with it.

You’ve been my rock for so many years and you held my hand while I was weaning off Internet Explorer, and I thank you for that, but you’ve changed.

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Help Me eMailbomb An eBay Scammer

So we’ve all seen it, but it still burns me up everytime.  You try to sell something on eBay,  you get creative with photoshop and attempt to make it all look pretty,  you list the thing for 9 days or so to get your money’s worth , and then you sit there each day watching the auction eagerly like an old man in a peep show.
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Gazeek.com blogging

So gazeek is now a blog based site.

If you’de like your own blog section, drop me a line.

Cheers