Not as many hackers?

[Aman]

I disagree on both points. I believe my comments are far from insulting to firefly and sincere in my saying that this separate hackers site will draw less hackers and therefore harm the growth of the hacker’s community. It has nothing to do with how nice the board is (the new board is absolutely beautiful!) but only the fact that it is not part of vbulletin.com’s board. In fact I think vbulletin.org would be a fantastic prototype board where hackers could see examples of how far one could take vbulletin if they were to take the time to modify it will all the great hacks and template mods people have painstakingly made. I also have an idea to have the best of both worlds, why not make a hack so vbulletin.org is integrated with vbulletin.com. In other words, so that this board becomes a customized sub forum within the other board but once the forum heading is clicked all the nice features and great design is available but still functions as part of the main community board as vbulletin.com? This could be called the boards within boards hack.

Anyway, I also disagree with the belief that some people will not use the board but others will come to make up the difference. I think the reasonable assumption is that because of the extra steps (work) involved in using two boards with separate urls and registrations a ratio of far more users will be lost then gained. I also don't see the logic in the argument that having the hacker's forum on vbulletin.com will necessarily mean more support issues because the hacker folks generate much of the free support by the community. Now they will be on this site and not as much on the other to offer their free advice leaving more of the burden on actual staff. Moreover, just because this has been discussed before doesn't mean it shouldn't be again after the results become apparent. After all, being something new, isn't this an experiment and so requiring actual feedback as we go?

As I mentioned, we will see! I could obviously be wrong. But aren’t we already witnessing a trend here!