phpbb3 to phpbb2

ilikepeach · Post by **ilikepeach** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 2:05 am

I did not like prosilver when I first saw it but it slowly grew on me. I'm sure profile on right was the hardest change to get used to for most people. Yellow row over on blue is a little odd too.

Out of curiousity, how come phpbb.com does not use the default blue prosilver?

Dog Cow · Post by **Dog Cow** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 5:26 am

ilikepeach wrote:Out of curiousity, how come phpbb.com does not use the default blue prosilver?

Because it would cause the users to leave and not come back.

narqelion · Post by **narqelion** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 5:57 am

Dog Cow wrote:Because it would cause the users to leave and not come back.

drathbun wrote:People don't join (or leave) a site based on the tool in use.

Beg to differ but from personal experience, yes they do.

I know I do myself and the same thing happened when I converted a phpBB2 board to 3.0.4 last December for one of my friends. The board had been established for four years on v2, was very active and they positively revolted after I converted. They absolutely hated the default style and the changed behavior,i.e. the very annoying "please wait while ..." redirects. Not to mention is was noticeably slower and more cumbersome to use based on their familiarity with v2. Overall the GUI was deemed too complex by the users, too many damn settings they said, the UCP freaked them out. You should see the PM's I got, seriously I was very glad these people did not know where I lived. In the short term I set the default style to subsilver to try and provide some familiarity and I worked feverishly for 3 weeks straight to get that board to look and behave as closely to the older version as possible to placate them, and even then it was long enough to lose a % of the regulars. They just did not like the new interface and stopped participating. It is human nature to not use something that you do not like. You might not like it because it's different than what you are used to or you might not like it because it has legitimate usability issues, i.e. harder to use, takes longer to do the same things. Whatever the reason for the dislike, it definitely does affect participation and use. I was still getting complaints about this or that on the new version up until July of this year (7 months after conversion) and then they just stopped complaining, but those specific people that complained that I couldn't really help just drifted out of the community and have not returned since.

Ger · Post by **Ger** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 7:02 am

runehints wrote:Yes, they was running phpbb2.

However they are now running a different system, and are even more popular.

So that concludes to... ?

Isn't it obvious than that the users didn't leave because you changed from phpBB2? They did that too, but are even more popular, while you are not. If they left you because of the change from phpBB2, they would have left your rivals as well.

Eelke · Post by **Eelke** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 9:12 am

It could be a factor in the whole matter, especially the radical change from phpBB2+Subsilver to phpBB3+Prosilver (if bound to standard themes, I would have at least opted for subsilver2 to go with phpBB3). I think most people are conservative in nature. They come to a board for the content, not for the board. If the way it looks or works changes, they will be biased negatively almost certainly. Not because it is worse, just because it is different.

Having said that, it's still "only" a tool. If the community was healthy in the first place, it would have survived a change in tooling.

Post by **KevC** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 9:48 am

runehints wrote:To be honest, I don't know why they left, over 95% of our members left, which is alot, all our members just suddenly left, however they all left to our rivals... and one by one, our remainder members left now we have just 10 members who are around, posts have slowed to a hult.

Why not email some of them and ask?

ChriZathens · Post by **ChriZathens** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 9:55 am

My users were initially complaining, too, after the conversion to v3... What I did from day 0 of my v3 board, was to create a modified prosilver with the same colors as before (in v2) and (of course) set profiles on the left (I never really understood this change and I think that - at least - there should be an option from the ACP or UCP to set either to left or right, not completely abandon left position).
Due to the fact that my v2 board was heavily modified and in v3 most of v2 mods were now in the core, after a while they admitted that the board was finally aesthetically nice plus much faster than it used to be, so the participation has not changed since...

daman2k · Post by **daman2k** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 11:55 am

I agree with you that there should be a option to change poster details back to the left.
The fact of the matter is that on the majority of forums the poster details is on the left, if you are going to change its location you should at least have the option to change it back as standard

Post by **KevC** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 11:57 am

It's only a couple of simple edits but I agree it would be nice if there was an official left and right version.

drathbun · Post by **drathbun** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 1:55 pm

narqelion wrote:
drathbun wrote:People don't join (or leave) a site based on the tool in use.
Beg to differ but from personal experience, yes they do. I know I do myself and the same thing happened when I converted a phpBB2 board to 3.0.4 last December for one of my friends. The board had been established for four years on v2, was very active and they positively revolted after I converted.

Fair enough, real-world experience trumps opinion.

It sounds like the switch was not managed very well. I suspect that the board owner simply took it upon himself (or herself) to upgrade without asking any of the board members, or without doing any testing or preview work. For example, I have a long-running board still running phpbb2. I have installed a phpBB3 board running in parallel with a small set of data and invited a subset of users over to test it out. The test users include all of my moderators and a small set of regular "power users" who I trust to give a reasonable opinion. The decision to upgrade... when to upgrade, and how to upgrade... of these decisions will be made by the group and not by an individual. So far the decision has been to wait until we (and by "we" I mean "me") can recreate some of the customizations we have for our current board on the phpBB3 framework.

I am also giving it some additional thought based on this discussion that took place earlier.

Finally, back to the original poster: the easiest way to undo the conversion from phpBB3 to phpBB2 is to restore your backups. You do have backups, right?

I recognize that if the board has been running phpBB3 for some time that some posts might be lost. However, it sounds like many of the posts from after the conversion were from people complaining about the conversion. It might be worth restoring the code and database backups from before the conversion and trying to rebuild from there.

If it were really important, you might be able to get someone to help with converting the new data from phpBB3 back to phpBB2, but I doubt you will find an official converter. It's too much work to write something that only a few people would be interested in using.

A_Jelly_Doughnut · Post by **A_Jelly_Doughnut** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:21 pm

narqelion wrote:They absolutely hated the default style and the changed behavior,i.e. the very annoying "please wait while ..." redirects.

Just for the sake of correctness: phpBB2 used the same type of "please wait" screens.

Yes, the various control panels are more complicated than in phpBB2, but the day-to-day usage of the board (posting & reading posts) is changed very little. Which isn't to say that users can't take exception to those changes and bolt.

narqelion · Post by **narqelion** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 4:45 pm

A_Jelly_Doughnut wrote:Just for the sake of correctness: phpBB2 used the same type of "please wait" screens.

That may be true, I honestly don't remember because I installed the board for her back in 2004 and modded it extensively to resemble and behave like the Invisionboard of that era, which is what I converted her from.

drathbun wrote:It sounds like the switch was not managed very well. I suspect that the board owner simply took it upon himself (or herself) to upgrade without asking any of the board members, or without doing any testing or preview work.

Not the board owner, me, at her request. She was in a panic because of the whole EOL fiasco she thought she had to convert by the end of 2008 and she tried to do it herself but ran into a problem, posted in the support forums here but got no help. Enter me, after years of inactivity and to be honest I had long given up on 3 ever seeing the light of day. I was surprised to see that not only was 3 out, 3.0.4 was newly released. So I logged into her server fixed the conversion error and executed the conversion. It was definitely short sighted on my part, and as I've already acknowledged in another topic if I had it to do over I would not. There was no need, the sky wasn't falling like chicken little said.

MartectX · Post by **MartectX** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 8:12 pm

Ger wrote:It's true that more conservative people don't like change, whatever that change is. But a good administrator knows his "flock" and anticipates. On my sword forums the visitors are quite conservative as well, so I started to develop a style of my own around the release of phpBB 3.0.RC2. With Subsilver2 as inspiration, that's true. Didn't loose any members in the process, most people just like it. 8)

I, too, began working on subSilver2 and edited the images so it used the original subSilver ones, also I edited the UCP modules (which is very easy to do with the new module system) to mimic the phpBB2 experience. Worked pretty well for me.

I would even welcome a style that absolutely 100% resembles subSilver. But I'm not in the mood to make any such thing myself.

runehints · Post by **runehints** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 11:08 pm

if you look at my phpbb2 forums, http://runehints.com/forum2
and look at my phpbb3 forums, http://runehints.com/forums
WE have had 2k posts in nearly 2 years.

However, this could be down to 2 reasons, the forum software, or the design.

ilikepeach · Post by **ilikepeach** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 11:30 pm

runehints wrote:if you look at my phpbb2 forums, http://runehints.com/forum2
and look at my phpbb3 forums, http://runehints.com/forums
WE have had 2k posts in nearly 2 years.

However, this could be down to 2 reasons, the forum software, or the design.

I agree that the new change might have contributed but it can't be the main reason. It may have cause some members to leave but not 95%.

advertisements