Lets get some new forums, Come on guys were all about changes here. We cant live in the past forever

It's neither about change nor "living in the past". It's about what's more functional, convenient and/or less headache to migrate to considering we've got an established database of users, moderators, threads/posts/documentation, etc.

Can you confirm whether or not we would have to abandon our current data? I anticipate there's a migration tool.

There are generally migration tools for every type of popular forum from vBulletin. A vBulletin to newer vBulletin is easily supported with tools provided by vBulletin and a migration to IP.Board is, as well.

Migration is generally easy and quite seamless.

I vote option #1.

option 2 seems the best to me. if you're going to upgrade, mine as well go all out.

option 1 seems pointless, unless there's some exploit where people are stealing passwords from here, and upgrading will solve it.

Well options 2 causes alot of problems with how graal game accounts are managed with forum access. Since every v bulletin doesn't come with graal lol. In the end what all do you gain from option 2 besides more plug in and potentially forced new style?

With option 1 everything is quite easy to do and won't break anything. And actually security wise oddly enough the version the forums use right now has very little known exploits.

Option 3 I don't have enough information on. I've never used ip boards or many others.

Hey Unix, with the new board, can you please also increase the permitted size of image / file attachments from 1MB to 5MB? (Or more?)


A lot of the allowed formats, such as zip, wav, midi, pdf, png, bmp, psd, doc, tar, tgz, and others often can't be attached because they're not small enough to do so.

For example, if you take a screenshot on Graal that is larger than a 1024 x 768 resolution, you will not be able to upload the full image. (1280 x 1024 is roughly 1.32MB and it only goes higher from there.)

It would be nice to post full screenshots on higher resolutions without having to crop or resize the images, as well as allowing people to post entire songs they've made, extensive documents written in pdf format, and so on.

Part of that is how color palette are handled in images. Png can use alpha channels for example and like 24 million colors while bitmap cannot and is much larger. Jpeg can compress size in alot of cases. But I agree we should be able to attach larger then 1 MB tho because some compression loses detail while other can be lossess.

Hi there.

I cannot recommend vBulletin 5.0 at all. We tried it for our forums for Valikorlia and it is just terrible! We upgraded from PHPBB to 5.0 and it was just a nightmare... We downgraded back to vBulletin 4.X and it is an amazing forum to work with, in my opinon.

http://www.kharlia.com/forumzzz - bad 5.0 forums
http://www.valikorlia.com/forum - good 4.x forums

Those are on the same host, same server for the database, but you will notice how much slower and unresponsive the vBulletin 5.1 Connect software is, I highly suggest you stay away from it.

IPBoard doesn't look too bad, but I am super happy with the last stable version of vBulletin 4.X - good luck in your decision!

There's no difference in maximum color depth for these formats as they are both lossless, but the difference between them is that png is compressed while bmp is not. Transparency is also supported by both formats, but png tends to handle it better since you can do gradient transparency with it if you want to get really fancy.

I've got to admit, the version 4 software layout does look pretty slick, but I'm wondering if the sluggish response from the version 5 software is due to the fact that the large graphics seem to reload on every new page. Just a thought.

Thanks for sharing those for comparison.

Even on the backend Admin Control Panel, which looks very similar to 4.X, it is very sluggish. There's just no real explanation for it other than some backend coding. We even tried moving to CloudFlare in-case it was our host.

+1 vouch for vB 4.

We use 4.2.2 on Era-GO and are very happy with it. The only problems we have ran into were scaling issues and high process usage, which were both problems of the host and of Apache, not vBulletin.

In case Stephane or anyone else is wondering about the backend to compare to his specs, we are only running on a small VPS with 1GB of RAM and 20GB of SSD space. We are using a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack to power everything, although I would like to eventually swap it to a LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack.

We have 1,000 active members, have 75-100 members online at a time, and have had up to almost 370 members online at a time. vB4 has served us to be very robust and a reliable forums solution.

I agree, however, the problem with this is that every new user that signs up for a client account gets a Graal####### account name by default.

You can only change it (your community name) after subscribing for gold service...which would again, but a "gold only" restriction for initial access to the forums.

I personally believe it would behoove Graal Online as a business if they opened up forum registrations to everyone, since they are moving towards a different pricing model for things. When a video game goes Free to Play, you rely on microtransactions and the hope that your game is popular enough that 2-5 dollars is enough money when multiplied out by hundreds or thousands of customers.

If you put up barriers between your game and its online community, you risk crippling the potential for more customers and thus more money.

In that sense, I believe the Graalians forum to be doing Graal Online quite a service in supporting the community. It is integral to making money, oh... and making friends and such :)

Anywho, I hope our opinions help you in the upgrade process. I realize forum care-taking can be very stressful!