State of the new forums

I see some people are a little bit overreacting in the forums... I see their point, the transition was everything but smooth, because the old site was getting really buggy, and most of the users were locked out from the site.

The previous site was using a fairly complicated set up. There was two databases, one for the forums, one for the users. These two databases were (suppose to) work toogether, so the user one would manage the user accounts, and the forum one would link posts to their owners.

Then the user database got crazy.

Lots of users were just not able to log in, so most of these locked out users were creating a new account to keep coming on the forums. thesituation got nasty as we wern't able to get the original developper to fix this, or even explain how we could fix this. So we could have stayed here, see the db get nastier and nastier, or we could try to clean things up.

The idea was to get rid of the complicated system of 2 databases, and only have one to do all the jobs. And as we wanted to change things for the better, we tried to reorganise the site in a better way, more user friendly, more up to date. On this, a new design.

All this work was done by volunteers, on top of there daytime jobs. Absolutelly no money was involved in this process (and that might explain why it took so long).

Problem was, we do not know anyone who could help us transfer the data. We're still seeking, but so far, no-one stand up for the job. We could have use the forums to do this, but we didn't, thinking that we could find our ressources locally. We didn't succeed yet. I heard people saying 'all my data are LOST... No, it's not lost, it is still in the previous databases, but we now have to find out a way to get it back live. It was a complicated setting, and we're hopping to get things back.

But also, we were concerned about the community, that basicaly could not use the forum properlly. It was an criticall situation, and we had a criticall solution. 

It is true though, that we should have communicate way more about this. Our bad, and we really apologise about this lack of organization. But it's now back to a clean state, and this is a huge improvment on the previous situation.

Unfortunatelly, some users are getting a little bit nasty about this transition, that's unfortunate, and if they can't get over this and want to go to another forum, then be it, there's nothing we can do about it, but stick to our plan. It is just unfortunate that after all these effort, we get insults and nasty comments, but our effort made this site back up on his feets, and that only is a great reward.

Thanks Brian for facing these attacks ! I hope this message settle things down... at least a little bit !