Upgrading Forum

[Amethyst]

Hello everyone! So after dodging around the internets for the past couple weeks, I've decided that there are certain bandwagons that need jumping on.

Namely-
Well, actually, our forum software, Invision Power Board, is one of the two most popular professional foruming systems out there, the other being vBulliten. You might recognize vBulliten from sites such as Mysidia or PokeCommunity, but in truth I've never been a fan of it.

That said, we're actually running a very old version of IPB- a 2.3 board whereas the current version is 3.1. Yikes. Now it's not as if this wasn't deliberate on my part. The truth is, when 3.x was first released, just before this site went live again, there were [i]no[/i] good skins for it, so I chose to remain with the old version (one that I am actually highly familiar with, and knew I could to some extent customize and work with).

However, like I said, after browsing some our neighboring sites, I'm finding that 3.1 is actually suddenly [i]really popular[/i] and contains many new features, such as displaying new posts, giving users their own blogs, status updates, mobile device support and generally being much smoother. Additionally the support network for 3.1 seems to be much greater than this archaic version...

So in short, I think it's finally time to upgrade.

...I'm not too happy about this, actually. Why? Because not three weeks ago I had just finished investing a huge amount of energy into synchronizing the appearance of the mainsite with that of the forums- and now the appearance of the forums is going to change entirely and the mainsite suddenly needs to be redone and when I had just done the new banners and skins they need to change too and the whole thing is just a very large scale operation of BLAH.

But I'll get over it.

But! On the note of the forums' appearance- this is where you guys come in- I'm torn as to which skin to use. Now, my license on our forum software is legit and perpetual- meaning I can upgrade us no problemo (I paid 200 dollars; I better get my money's worth out of it. >.>). But the skin is a different story.

The free skins are still classless in my opinion, but hunting around some professional design sites, I've found a few options that I would be okay with. I'd like to leave the final decision to you guys. Don't worry about the price- none are too expensive and I'm willing to ford the cost. But there are some things you should know before you go off voting:

-Whatever skin we get WILL be edited to be Pokemony
-It WILL be normalized across five different colors as we have now
-The banners of all of them WILL be redone.
-The mainsite WILL be redesigned to match... hopefully. *deep breath*

That said, let me show you our candidates:
[url="http://www.skinbox.net/browse/live-demo/skin/113"]Blood[/url]
[url="http://www.skinbox.net/browse/live-demo/skin/108"]Brave[/url]
I can't hot-link you to these next three, but all of them are on this page:
[url="http://www.transversestyles.com/work.html"]http://www.transversestyles.com/work.html[/url]
They are:
-Skilltest
-VRocking
-Battlegear

Vote away, kids. For grins and giggles, I've made it so you can vote for more than one.

[Velocity]

Good choice upgrading to IPB, it's so much better.

I make skins for a small price, if you want you can take a look at the 5 skins I made for my site (you know the link so I won't bother posting it )

[N8theGr8]

Battlegear, because it just looks so vibrant yet sleek. I love it.

When I saw Blood, I thought "omfgthat'sawesome,i'mtotallyvotingforthat"

But when I saw [i]Battlegear[/i], I thought "OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD. This is fucking amazing!!!!11111oneoneeleven"

[Will]

Going with [i]VRocking[/i]...although [i]Blood[/i] looks pretty good too, so I voted for both.

[Amethyst]

Okay.
So.

Big fat NEVERMIND on this whole poll.
I was poking around for some other options on the official Invision site, and lo and behold what did I find but an up-to-date version of our current skin. This will make the transition remarkably (relatively) smooth, so definitely snagging that as soon as I can. A couple hoops to jump through but we're looking at an update probably late next week.

[N8theGr8]

Cool? (I liked Battlegear more but whatever)

[ashenneko]

Late [i]next[/i] week? What about all this week (other than Friday, since you've already said you're gone)? Seems like someone's shirking duties.

[Amethyst]

[quote name='ashenneko' post='11482' date='Mar 7 2011, 05:07 PM']Late [i]next[/i] week? What about all this week (other than Friday, since you've already said you're gone)? Seems like someone's shirking duties.[/quote]
Unless I can do it tomorrow, I won't have time. Wednesday, school. Thursday through sunday I'm otherwise obligated. Monday, more school. Etc.
Invision is quicker to respond than I expected though so tomorrow is remotely possible...