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!