Neverside

Agreed - there was a significant amount of downtime during the changeover, since the forum was not ready for use (which I was not aware of until after the switch - had I known that, we very well might still be called TutorialForums right now haha). It remained offline since the forum was supposedly almost done... just around the corner. When the forum did come online and the lack of features made many desire to return to TF, that wasn't possible due to the lack of a conversion process for the data back into vBulletin - one could have been worked on, but that of course would have been demoralizing to the staff and slowed down the actual solution of finishing NS (which was further away than I could have imagined at the time). When everything finally did come online, the sole focus and news from us on staff was only about development, which no doubt was tiresome after a short while by a lot of the members.

Anyhow... I will eventually be inviting the full list of about 18,000 members back to NS to see the new version once it's completed (an email will be sent to everyone who marked their account to receive messages from the administrators). That won't happen though until - well of course the new NS is complete, stabilized, and growing - and until a solid system is in place to manage the repercussions of the email (e.g. dealing with thousands of bounced emails, enabling anyone to permanently unsubscribe from emails from NS, enabling anyone to have their account removed if that's what they want, staff is ready to deal with support requests, etc). There will be benefits/incentives in place to help encourage as many as possible to retain their accounts and their newsletter subscriptions. Hopefully at least a decent fraction of those 18,000 people will choose to stick around and become active members again.

The above is one example of the strategic planning type of stuff I have been doing... I have pages upon pages of similar plans to try to look into the future and predict how things might end up, and how best to deal with those situations when they happen.

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Originally posted by AbsoluteCross:

(which I was not aware of until after the switch - had I known that, we very well might still be called TutorialForums right now haha).

Makes two of us bro.

Originally posted by AbsoluteCross:

that of course would have been demoralizing to the staff and slowed down the actual solution of finishing NS (which was further away than I could have imagined at the time).

Ditto again.

___________________

The Audoptic Weblog. It's where the magic happens.

Haha yeah - just to clarify... wasn't blaming Shawn. He, as much as I, was doing the best he could with the information he had been given.

___________________

-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com