VEX Forum Update 2015

VEX Friends,
We’re happy to announce that some changes will be coming to www.vexforum.com over the next few weeks. We’ll be upgrading the forums to vBulletin 5. This is the same version currently used on [www.vexiqforum.com. The structure, as well as all the posts, threads, and user accounts will be migrating to the new forum, so most content should be right where you left it.

As part of this upgrade, we will be eliminating the VEX Forum Photo Gallery. The new forums support better image hosting directly in posts & threads, so we expect the community will better take advantage of the Robot Showcase forum. All the existing images will be migrated into a Flickr gallery where they’ll be available for viewing.

In addition, we are going to be locking the VEX wiki. Much of the official VEX content which is hosted there will be migrated into other locations (i.e. product data will be moved onto product web pages). The content on the wiki itself will remain in place for reference.

We appreciate your support and understanding as we make this migration. VEX is committed to the support and growth of our outstanding user community. We feel this forum change will help us provide an even better experience moving forward.

Let us know if you have any questions or concerns.](www.vexiqforum.com. The structure, as well as all the posts, threads, and user accounts will be migrating to the new forum, so most content should be right where you left it.)

The current vex forum is as perfect at it is. The nice gray and red color seems nice, and feels better than the vex iq forum. This forum feels so perfect, I don’t have a single complaint, why change it so suddenly?

It isn’t very sudden, really. Many of us have been waiting for this update for quite some time, and it was mentioned as being planned more than two years ago.

Glad to hear that the forum will finally be receiving this update! I just hope we get code syntax highlighting.

I kind of agree. I don’t like the IQ forum, I have hard time navigating. But I also spend about 1% of my time there compared to here. So I suppose I will get used to it and end up finding reasons to like it better…I hope.

The IQ forum is not nearly as friendly as this one IMHO. I guess this was bound to happen but I always thought that perhaps we would move to something other than vBulletin. Hopefully all the old posts and links will still work, there are hundreds of hours invested in those. Perhaps we could keep this forum as a read only archive. To be honest, if the new forum is as hard to use as the IQ forum now may be a good time to retire from it.

I would plead that VEX Archives this old forum, and moves on to a modern forum system like Discourse or Codoforum I feel as if vBulletin and phpBB are both super clunky and old form technologies.

the only issue i have with the current forum is the really old bbcode, you cant edit your thread’s first post after awhile, the size limit on avatars is small, and it looks pretty bad but it has a more readable recent activity page ( https://vexforum.com/ ) i hope the new forum has a better theme than the iq one

I agree with Harrison, I think we should move on from vbulletin. Discourse is really nice

Heres a link to a forum that uses Discourse:
https://forum.teksyndicate.com/
(I like it a lot)

Thanks for the link. I had thought that I hated Discourse from other sites, that link sealed the deal. That is one ugly page. Not sure who though the white letters on black background was a happy thing to do.

One of the things I love about the current forum and Chief Delphi is HOW FAST THE PAGE LOADS ON A SLOW CONNECTION. With the exception of pages that are loaded with imbedded pictures or huge signature files with graphics (why yes, I am looking at you Bots’n’Stuff) the pages load very quickly.

The new systems like Discourse are loaded with tiny graphics that take time to load and render out. Places that support links on pages with twitter, facebook, etc, etc, etc on every post are just a mess.

I travel a lot and I use a hotspot on a regular basis. Big deal between your school provided 100Gbit link and my 1Mbit link.

As far as the look and feel go, I’m going to guess they will keep that, we will get the bennies of some new Vbulletin features

I also agree that syntax highlighting would be an amazing feature to have!

AAAAAHHHHHH. Powers that be?!!? Are you reading this? I sure hope so!

This is what I like about the current forums. I can easily see the recent activity nicely organized. When I go over the the IQ forum I don’t even know where the heck to start reading.

I just looked at it…terribly hard to read. Please no.

I am quite worried that we are going to lose a lot of the awesome work on these forums by people like jpearman. Sure they say things will still be here…lets see how that works out.

I too prefer the current view with the latest threads rather than the IQ forum style list of categories. On the IQ forum there is a tab with “latest activity”, which is sort of like the home page here, but far from as easy and nice to navigate.

Also, to VEX, could you give us a heads up a couple of days before the update is done? That way we can save/archive up to date pages if we want to.

I just looked and I can’t find a proper code syntax highlighter for vB 5.0 at all.

So may I suggest a hack… Honestly whoever is doing this, read this please.

Take this project and include it in the main forum code (just add the js and css into every forum page header).

Then create a BBCode in vB for code highlighting. Map the BBCode to the pre tag used by the highlighter.

IE

[CCODE]My code[/CCODE] -> <pre class="brush: c">My code</pre>

And boom, code highlighting done properly with like 5 minutes of work.

First you make VRC use the IQ number plates, now you make us use their forum as well?

I do like the current VRC forum, especially the homepage that shows recent thread activity.

These are some of the issues I have with the current VexIQ forum.

It doesn’t work very well with my iPhone in the browser.

It doesn’t work very well with my iPad in the browser (and I have no interest in using a dedicated app for the forum, my iPad is still on IOS 5.1, it’s old).

The display of new topics is too verbose with the thread titles mixed in with too much superfluous information. I’m looking at a page in my browser now, I only see the first six posts, on the verforum portal page I see at least 30 threads, it easy to see new threads and quickly scan to see who has answered old ones. There’s too much “bling” and not enough content.

I don’t see any attachments only a “media” tab in my user settings (on the IQ forum), it says I have 20 photos and 1 video, when I click on photos nothing is there. I often search through my attachments to find old posts but that doesn’t work over there.

This may have been fixed by now (they said it was going to be) but preview of posts used to lose all the formatting. When you spend a considerable amount of time composing long technical posts the need to preview and edit is very important, I pretty much stopped using the IQ forum when every time I previewed it lost all text formatting. This was supposed to be fixed in V5.1 but there is no indication of the VB version and I have not posted much recently, perhaps it works correctly now.

When I upload an image that has the same name as an existing image, all the versions are kept. Again I did not try this recently but often I add an attachment and after seeing how the post looks go back and modify the image and re-upload so that it looks better.

I don’t know much about forum software but I have posted on several different ones in the past. The IQ forum does not have many “superusers”, I think they mostly abandoned it due to the bad user experience it gave. I hope the same does not happen here, I hear good things about xenForo, can Vex Support share some the reasons we need to stay with VB or upgrade at all?

It also seems a shame to lose the wiki. I realize that very few people ever edit the wiki and it’s a bit out of date, but there is information there that I’m sure will not make it to the product pages, for example, the schematic for the power expander. or battery load test data. These were added by forum users and provide a valuable additional (and unofficial) resource for other users that VEX never provides.

Anyway, I’m sure this is probability a done deal. Perhaps my concerns are unfounded and everything will be better, or perhaps we (the current forum users) will all go and live in a parallel universe and do our own thing.

Edit:
An example.
Good
[ATTACH]9360[/ATTACH]

Not so good
[ATTACH]9361[/ATTACH]

forum_1.jpg672×896 88.7 KB

forum_2.jpg738×984 85.4 KB

I genuinely enjoy these forums and would absolutely hate to see the use of them lessened. I really really hope that VEX has thought this through and the new setup will not cause people to leave or become less involved.

**many people of the internet are a bit temperamental and adverse to change…they may scare easily

eh, hopefully the new forums will be more attractive to people, only a small precentage of vex teams use it so we will gain more users than we lose

shows this forum to any vex team member, they will love it. This forum is so attractive already.

As BNS already has a wiki with lots of info, I’m wondering if the VEX Wiki could be pulled onto BNS so it is still actively available and editable? I think that, or making a new copy/archive of it elsewhere, is the best option (other than keeping it).

Does this mean that we might be getting a VEX Forum app, or at least proper phone browser compatibility?
That would be fantastic…