P8ntballer Site Upgrade Complete!

If you are reading this thread, it means we have finally finished upgrading P8ntballer to the most powerful forum software available!

Hopefully, everything has transfered correctly, however if not, please create a thread in this forum explaining the problem. Likewise, if you find a bug in the new site, please let us know so we may fix it as soon as possible.

The new forum focuses much more on social interaction, taking the best of forums, facebook, twitter and other such sites, merging them into an incrediable peice of software which we hope you will love as much as we do.

Below is a recap of why we did the transfer. But otherwise, we hope you enjoy the new P8ntballer experience.




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As many of you know, we have been using vBulletin for a very long time on P8ntballer. Since the beginning, we have been through more than 30 software updates. Whilst many boards find upgrading a simple and quick process, a site like P8ntballer requires a lot of extra work to make them happen, it has finally come to a point where we feel vBulletin can no longer suit our users needs, as well as allowing us to continue providing you the best paintball forum in Europe.

The vBulletin software has become slower and slower since our original version of 3.0. vBulletin has been promising a complete rewrite of the software for quite some time to speed up page load times but has delivered patches upon patches that have resulted in an overly bloated software full of holes and bugs, one such bug is the reason why we were hacked several weeks ago.

vBulletin's original creator is named Kier Darby and is well known in the forums arena for his genius. Keir left vBulletin about 2 years ago when vBulletin was bought out by a big conglomerate called IB (Internet Brands), just before we moved over to vBulletin 4. Since then, Kier has been working on a revolutionary forums package called Xenforo.

About a year ago, Xenforo was released in it's beta form; fortunately, we were given beta access and have been running the forum alongside our current vBulletin forum.
What we have found is that it offers a greater simplicity of use and speed over the current software while implementing some very new cutting-edge features.

Now, over a year later, we believe Xenforo is mature enough to move our site over to this new software. We suspect this will happen within the next few weeks and I am confident you will appreciate the change.
Our platinum members have had access to our testing board, and the feedback has been 99% positive, with the remaining 1% being minor items we hope to fix shortly after making the switch.

All of our forum posts, user accounts, passwords and settings will carry over to the new software.

There wont be anything special that you have to do, except for possibly updating your avatar.

We will lose some content, such as blogs or groups, however these are features which are seldom used anyway, and will most likely not be missed, this move has not been taken lightly, as can be seen from the length of time we have spent evaluating the new software.

In this thread, I will highlight a few of the exciting new features in Xenforo to prepare you for the rollout.

We are acutely aware of the need in the present market-place to try and stay ahead of the curve to ensure our members have the best software platforms to interact with.
This new transition is just such an example whereby we have invested in this new platform.
We hope that once you start using it, you will appreciate its advantages over the old vBulletin system.

A short list of some of the enhancements over our current software:

• Animated Transitions: Clicking on almost anything will give you more information about the item clicked.
• PM's are now called PC's (Personal Conversations) and are not limited to 2 people, you can start a personal conversation with 4 or 5 people at once, or invite others if you think it neccissary, such as requiring a mod to input into a situation.
• Likes: Similar to our Thank system, except you are notified when others like your posts
• Alerts: Notifies you of people that have liked your posts or people who have quoted your post
• Enhanced attachments: Attachments are easier than ever to insert into a post.
• More attachments: No more having to delete old attachments, keep them forever!
• Easier Navigation: Navigating the forum is easier, more intuitive.
• Less Clutter: More information but uses animation and member cards to organize it.
• Following: Like a Facebook Friends system, it allows you to follow your friends in your own personal news-feed.
• Enchanced search!: A new search feature, meaning searches will be more accurate and a lot faster. Allowing searches for 3 letter words!
• And much more to be included in this thread soon!

Here are some video's demonstrating just some of the new features included in Xenforo.

Inserting Images into a post:




Viewing member activity:




Quoting multiple posts:




Member Card:




Easy Navigation:



If you have any feedback, questions or concerns over this upgrade, please ask them here and we will answer them for you.

The P8ntballer Team

Fear change

As you can imagine, moving from one peice of software to another is a complex proccess, made even more complex by the size of this site and the many, many custom features it has.

w00t w00t!

I'd love to take some credit for this but I can't; this is pretty much all down to Jon Coleman [Admin / Bon], all I did was give it the green light and financed it.

Normally, I'm a bit conservative and don't really embrace change that well but Jon came up with some pretty convincing arguments as to why this platform would better suit our members ... and at first glance, I think he's bang on the money.

This might take a bit of getting used to but I think a lot of you guys who are a lot younger than myself are well equipped to deal with any of the changes we've made here ... when you get older, it's not so easy ... so, don't get old.
I never really liked the thought of getting old but the alternative was a little less appealing.

I'd like to thank Jon for his work and counsel and to all my mods for suggesting a lot of the changes that this new year is going to bring to this site.
This new software platform change is the first of the major changes and there will be others coming behind it that tend to focus upon extending our membership and embracing wider areas of our much-loved sport.

At the moment, we [Paintball] are in the process of evolving in a surprising new direction brought about by the recent downturns in the world-wide paintball economy ... for some companies, it will mean their demise, for others, the smart ones, they'll use it as an opportunity; I ain't saying we're smart, I just wanna give you guys the best possible product in these difficult times and that of course needs investment.
In times of recession, that's the one thing people tend not to have available, money to invest.
I got my fingers crossed anyway.
I hope you all enjoy the changes and if any of you have any questions or queries then please get in touch with either myself or any of the mod team, all of whom will be happy to assist.