VEX Forum Upgrade 2019

Hi everyone,

As some of you may remember, we migrated the VEX Forum to esoTalk a little over 3 years ago now. When we made this decision, we had planned on soon moving both the VEX EDR and VEX IQ Forums to a new forum software that was (and still happens to be) in development, named Flarum.

In this time, we’ve seen a number of spam problems with esoTalk and a variety of other web security issues arise with vBulletin, the VEX IQ forum software. With no projected launch to Flarum in sight, we’ve made the decision to reverse course, and combine both the VEX EDR and VEX IQ Forums on a different forum software named Discourse. (NOT to be confused with Discord. As many others did when Chief Delphi made a similar migration about a month ago)

Discourse is a much more modern and actively developed forum software than both esoTalk and vBulletin, and we feel that it is much more friendly to users. Should you want to poke around and see how it works, you can check out the main features of Discourse here, a New User Guide here, or a demo forum here. A few cool highlights being: dark mode, a better mobile experience, a better editor, embedded media, community moderation, better spam prevention, a searchbar that doesn’t suck, not being logged out after ~15 minutes of inactivity, working navigation links that will actually take you to the first or last post of a thread, etc.

Unlike the last time we migrated the VEX Forum software, we do not believe that anything will be lost during the migration. So you will not have to worry about backing up or recovering all your PM’s like last time. If you have an account on both the VEX EDR and VEX IQ Forums that use the same email, they will be merged together. (And don’t worry, if you’re only interested in one forum or the other, you can easily hide channels in your account settings)

We are currently planning on migrating the Forums on Monday, February 11th. It will take about a day for the migration to take place, so expect them to come back online the following day, 2/12. When the Forum comes back online, you’ll need to request a new password from the Login screen using your email address or username. (note: Usernames with spaces are not supported, so an underscore will be added in their place)

It will take some time to explore the new system, and things will function differently. Please take some time to check out the links above and figure things out. As we make the transition, we will tweak some of the settings to whatever works best for our communities.

Let me know if you have any questions. We appreciate your patience during the transition!

You had me sold when you said “dark theme”

you had me at “staying logged in”

@DRow Are you merging the VEXIQ and VRC forum’s into ONE forum?

Please don’t do that. Please, please, please. While it’s very quiet, the VEXIQ forum is not the nightmare jungle of posts that this forum is. There is very little overlap of topics there, the only thing that’s missing is the Event Partner forum.

Please, please, please don’t merge them.

+1.

I am a big fan of this hiding specific channels in settings. I don’t like the current options of everything or one channel.

Also, the last post thing is odd. It does successfully put the url for the last post in the address bar, it just doesn’t navigate. I have had complete success by pressing the button, then clicking in the address bar and hitting enter.

Make unofficial discord official ez done

I was opposed to this idea at first, but I think I’ll learn to live with it, especially with the function to hide the IQ channels.
I hope one of the fixes has to do with fixing my username tagging.

But what website am I supposed to mindlessly go to on Monday instead?

On behalf of all the VEXIQ forum members and readers, I rest my case.

Didn’t he say you can hide channels?

@DRow,

If you have to migrate to a new platform, please, make sure that links to attached files, pictures, and other threads still work.

Since chiefdelphi switched to a new platform, a lot of the urls lead to nowhere, greatly reducing the informational value of the site. For example, both White Paper and image links in this Thunder Chickens CVT thread are broken.

We have barely recovered after the last upgrade from all the broken urls and lost image attachments that this forum had suffered.

Please, let us test the beta version first, before doing irreversible forum conversion.

I mean while not being VEX run its pretty VEX approved. A couple VEX employees and most of Robot Mesh are all regular members. I assume they like not having the 100% moderate every single thing.

Wait, you’re telling me that the “Remember me” button might work soon? I support this.

Can’t wait for it to start working in 8 weeks^tm

Discord TOS has a minimum age of 13

Finally. The forums have been saved.

Lol. I have no hope for that working.

YES!!!

I wasnt serious

I agree completely.

I expect that the forum will be tested (at least by the forum staff) before it is upgraded, but there is still a chance that another user might discover a bug that the forum staff doesn’t. I suppose letting the public beta test the new forum before it becomes permanent might even make a few people feel better about the direction VEX is headed.

Either way, I am definitely looking forward to the new forum (especially the improved search function)!