This site...

[Floris]

Originally Posted by Saintdog

I do not believe my absence from this site has done harm to the vBulletin product or site in general as we were not even linked to until a short while back, all traffic to the site was directed by way of word of mouth, through other members linking to the website, through search engines and the like.

Users put the effort of informing others, After they found out this has become an official site. That doesn't take away this couldnt' harm the overall community.

[Floris]

Originally Posted by iHCF

it isnt saintdog's fault that posts counts arent high here. don't blame it on him. just by the fact that they have 3 people on their staff doesnt mean posting is low. maybe you dont notice, whenever someone has a problem here, and it's posted, it's more than usually addressed by someone in the community and is usually solved. dont blame low staff numbers on posting.

I must say no no.
All the restriction we daily run into while posting and sharing our work is not processed after mentioning and I am still using xiphoid as username and never had any replies to the mod job I offered to get things spiced up again. They all refer to sd being the one who can apply the changes, having to wait for the upgrades before applying them and 'no need for new staff atm' answers and 'bit busy right now to discuss' removing any credibility I had in this site. Reading how slow the response time on rant posts are and community members helping before official replies, doesn't motivate me to participate in discussions much, let alone take the time to read things through or help others.

[Wayne Luke]

Originally Posted by xiphoid

Since I can't post more then 1 paragraph without running into flood errors about images that aren't used, here is a follow up.

In all fairness, the site itself isn't experiencing technical problems within the capabilities of vBulletin 3 beta 6. Not sure why you would experience this kind of error as I have never seen it here.

[Brad]

floris altho these things arent normally brought out in public we did discuss you becoming a moderator and we decided at the time the current staff has it covered. This was some time ago, I do not know why you did not recive a responce.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by Wayne Luke

In all fairness, the site itself isn't experiencing technical problems within the capabilities of vBulletin 3 beta 6. Not sure why you would experience this kind of error as I have never seen it here.

The quote tag has images which get counted to the number of images allowed in a post. This is where the error comes from.

[Wayne Luke]

Originally Posted by Brad.loo

I am willing to upgrade this board to RC 3 if needed, and will keep it up to date if needed, just send all info about the upgrade to my email and when you would like it done.



There is no need to take sides here, IMO everyone is begin truthful here, we all know this site needs work and as needed it for awhile.

At this point, this is the best way to proceed. Honestly, I think this can be a good site. I don't think you can blame vBulletin 3 on the decline, though in all honesty I am sure it is a contributing factor. Also the License System is an issue we are constantly working on. It works no worse here than it does at vB.org, vB.com or vBulletin-Germany. There are always glitches that have to be handled manually. The difference is for the longest time there hasn't been anyone here to handle those glitches.

So going forward, I think the best way to handle this would be to 1) Upgrade the site 2) Create the reciprocal links to other official vBulletin sites.

Then work on traffic. vBulletin.org no longer has a template forum open to the public so that should not be an issue anymore. I personally recommend this site to hundreds of customers and potential customers per month over the phone, through email and by other means. Unfortunately, at this moment in time it seems like a bad referral. If the license system is really that bad of a problem here then appoint a liason with proper vBulletin Staff to look into issues and resolve them. I personally would take on that responsibility as having a template site is that important to vBulletin. There really isn't anything that is insurmountable here.

[SaintDog]

Wayne, I would be more than happy to appoint you, though I had never received any word from you that you were directly interested in doing such except by the above posting. I would be more than happy to move your status to administrator as well as any other vBulletin staff member in order to maintain control.

Brad has volunteered to help with the upgrade and so we will proceed with him doing such as soon as I can gather the FTP information (right now, I only have a PM from kier with the e-mail password and login, not FTP).

New staff will be appointed as needed and the forums are already planned for revamping as per a post in the staff lounge by a mod with a very nice structure, of which I would like to see here as well. I have upgraded Brads status and will continue to appoint worthy moderators and admins to help carry out the duties to keep the site moving.

Once my business work load is lowered, I will be back to maintain the site with the efforts I originally did, though I cannot control the amount of work per day that comes in, as customers e-mail us, they have to be answered so there is little I can do as I can't not provide support for them .

[Tony G]

For a long period of time, especially around September 2003 until now, I observed the site go down and down. I, as well as Faranth, and other people have worked to get more people aware of vBulletinTemplates.com. Like Wayne said, with 13,000 members and only a handful of posts per day, you can see that something isn't working.

A community really excels when there is active administration around. Members feel like when they're having problems, that they can contact an active admin with ease about anything regarding the forum. That's definently one of the reasons why the forum started to die. I would get frequent messages over AIM, and even threads here as you have seen asking where SaintDog was. SaintDog is a very big part of vBT, and I realised that it could not function without him, without an admin to be on the forums when needed. It came to the point that people asked me to do administration jobs for them, when I couldn't. At a time during last year, I was the really only active staff, but brad.loo started to come alot more and it helped me, and the community alot.

All this, together with vBulletin.org being the place for template questions brought vBT to where it is now. But I feel, I know, things will change.

I have always offered my services to SD and vBT, supporting, and helping around here. It's my duty, as a moderator, to do that. The last thing I wanted to do was let down the community, non-active moderators would be the last thing we needed. But we need more people, like I have, devoting some time to vBT.

I am happy to see that SD has appointed Brad.loo to admin, and planning to appoint other people to help out too. This will bring the place some active admins, and will make members feel better again.

Also, the planned upgrade, will help members to come back.

But more must be done, awareness of vBT needs to increase like it was back when we were on vB2. Together with all these improvements, vBT will improve.

xiphoid - I spefically remember telling you over IRC that we had decided that no new staff were required at that time. I know you had waited a while, so I informed you at the time. The administration was struggling, but with little posts, the mods were doing fine. I thought you understood that at the time. It means as much coming from me as it did coming from SD in an e-mail. And the problems you address in your post, with no name changes and such, are because of administration, not moderation. Community members have as much right to help out as staff do.

But in summary, better things are to come, and I'm glad these changes are coming.

[StarBuG]

I want to bring up some more points to attention:

The biggest problem this site has is the rather chaotic way modifications are released and supported here!
If you are a user of vB.org and you search for a hack you directly see in the topic for wich version it was made.
If you have problems with a hack the support is in most cases quick and good

If you look for a hack here you see a topic like "[release] Flag in postbit".
There is no mention for wich version it was released sometime not even in the first post(for this one it was a gamma release)!
You try to install and it doesn´t work because templates have changed.
You ask for support and you can mostly wait several days or solve the problem yourself.

It´s very sad because I think this is what drives users away form your site.
Back in the old days where template hacks are on vB.org it was totaly different.

Suggestions to improve the quality of your site:

1) make clear rules for hack postings (eg vB version in topic title)
2) make a better structure for your modification forums (eg add Forum Home improvements, Profile improvements, etc)
3) make the hack coders support there hacks and if hacks are not supported make a category "unsupported modifications"
4) allow HTL files as attachments

I hope the quality of this site will improve in the near future cause otherwise it would make customers wish the template mod forums would still be on vB.org

Don´t take this personaly I know how much work it is to support a big community but it can be done (see vB.org).
If you can´t manage it yourself because of lag of time get people who are willing to do so!
I think you would get more then enough volunteers

Greetings

StarBuG
ps: please take this as constructive critizism

[Zachery]

We are currently aware of how disorgnized we are and were hoping to remedy that with the upgrade.

I peronsly dont see a need to have each template group broken down into differnt modifactions, this would only confuse the end users more. As most users come here asking what templates to modify in the first place

With template mods almost no one will release a non working copy and if they do, trust me no one will use it.

As ive said before i dont see a need to have HTL extensions allowed here. the HTL is a hacking tool, and while it can do template instructions alone, there are alot of users here who will customize there style ine very way but not ever touch a php file. and forcing them to install the HTL just to install a template mod would be stupid and unneeded.

vB.orgs template section is part of the reason we havent had much traffic however now that its gone im hoping to see more trafic here