Considering an Upgrade to vBulletin version 3.0.3

[Robert]

I'm currently reviewing vBulletin for use as the main TOE forum. From what I can tell so far, it looks like it has more to offer, promotes a better user community, is easier to manage, and has better support. If you go with vBulletin, I'll make the change before the end of the year and all posts and user accounts would be ported to the new system.

If you want to weigh in you can post a comment or answer the poll. You can check it out yourself here.

[Robert]

Hmmm... Not a large response on the poll. Well, we did get one response (It was me ). That person likes vBulletin so looks like we're moving to vBulletin.

I'm planning to upgrade the forum to vBulletin this week. If things go well then all your accounts and messages will be ported to the new system and you can just log in and enjoy all the new features. One new feature is the personal journal that will be available to everyone so you can all record your thoughts on your personal quest for the Theory of Everything, or anything else you want to talk about.

[Robert]

As you can see, the new forum is up and running. It seems that importing the data from the phpbb forum went smoothly. Please let me know if any of you see any problems. I'm tweeking things a bit now and need to adjust the color scheme some more so you can expect the forums to change a little more over the weekend.

[tom mccurdy]

are you going to be adding latex to your forum?

[math] x^2 [/math]
sorry just checking to make sure you don't already have it

[Robert]

I do plan on adding latex support to this forum. I'm just not sure yet if I can leverage a hack (there is a vBulletin hack I'm playing with; not comfortable with it yet), port the phpbb latex hack, or roll my own hack. In any case, It's important for a forum of this type and will be supported. I'll open a new thread on this once I've done some more investigating.

[Robert]

Tom, unless things go horribly wrong I'll have LaTeX up and running by late tomorrow evening. I ended up doing the hack myself. Everything seems to be working right now (although not enabled in the forum yet). The only remaining tasks are testing and writing some introductory material. I'll post the announcement to the "News and Announcements" thread once it's enabled. --Robert