Shutting down the old forums following release of new portal...

[NicktheGeek]

A couple of important pieces of information. These specific forums are being locked. There is a new community forum that is being started. In other words, we will be keeping forums as part of the full support solution. We are creating a support portal for technical and usage support. One of the biggest frustrations we have had with forum support is that it is not possible to track threads that need a response outside of our unanswered posts list. There are so many ways in which that causes problems. Also, if a mod has replied but ends up taking a day or even a few days off (we do need time off on occasion) there isn't anything in place that lets everyone else see a thread has been replied to. The new support portal addresses all of those things.

The old system made things difficult for maintaining downloads. USers had to either get ProPlus and get their download from a private forum, or they had to use a third party system which limited the number of downloads. There were so many problems it isn't even funny. People not receiving emails, the emails going ot the wrong address for various reasons and so forth. It is a bit of a nightmare really. The new system makes for a single portal so users purchasing just Genesis or Genesis and a few child themes use the same download system as users purchasing ProPlus. It makes so much more sense, and the tutorials are right there with the downloads. To say it is better than the current system is a vast understatement.

I know change can be scary. We have been talking about this for over a year with major development going on for nearly a year on this system. There might be some growing pains, but we have taken so long to get this into place because we want to make sure this is better for everyone. We know that the forums are a great place for the community to add to the product. I have been impressed at the help I've seen community members give one another and the cool things we have seen them share. In the new forums we truly hope this continues and we have tried to think of things we can do to encourage this such as providing space to show code you have used for cool projects. We wish to see the forums remain as one very important leg of the support system, but vBulletin is both overkill and limiting. It doesn't provide good searching and requires some pretty difficult integration steps. It is a great system but just isn't what is needed in this case.

We will leave these forums open for reading, searching, and copying. It is just not going to be open for posting new threads/posts. The new forums will open for that and should fully replace these forums over time. I don't have an exact time frame but I can say these forums aren't likely to disappear before the end of the year. I imagine the traffic will be monitored and once we have everything we need for the tutorials/knowledge base and traffic is down to a crawl these forums will be phased out the rest of the way. By then everyone will be using the new forums.

As to the timing, we are setting this up right now. We will be doing some final testing, checking to make sure the accounts are all setup, and then making the final change. The exact date is a bit up in the air but watch for an email in the next few days with the hard details.

If these forums get shut down and you didn't get an email with your new account details, PLEASE (seriously I can't stress this enough) let us know via our contact form. Let us know your purchase email address and forum account name. We are doing everything we can to make this as painless as possible but with almost 90k registered members it is possible for some to slip through the cracks and there are going to be users who never registered in the forums. We are trying to compare and merge data from past purchases with forum member details and then convert that all to the new system but we are aware that things may not be 100% on the switch over. So please let us know if you think you were missed. We want to do everything we can to find your account and make sure you have access to the new system.