Originally posted by Stealth
Oh, so because there's newer versions available, we should, of course, upgrade...
Sandwich: i don't know. that may be a concept you're not familiar with. but with me, if something's working right, at least to the outsider, then i don't see a reason to change it. sure you guys may be having problems behind the scenes, but i assure you that to all us regular users it seems to be working fine 
and if you upgrade to a newer vBulletin, i'm pretty sure you'll have more problems than you have now 
I'm bump-replying to this, because I want things to be clear - you guys deserve to know.
HLP has been having fairly major MySQL (database) problems over the past few months. If you've gotten those "Connection to server timed out" or "Too many connections" MySQL errors, that's what I'm referring to. Such errors are firmly on GameSpy's side of things - it would not matter what forum package we used (except UBB, of course, which doesn't USE a MySQL database).
The problems Setekh and I were talking about are more behind the scenes, hidden from the eyes of most of you all. Primarily, we've had an absolute ton of access mask issues - people being able to view private forums without being assigned access. To make matters worse, these issues (AFAIK) cannot be resolved via the vB control panel - according to the CP, the user access mask is generally set correctly. We've had to delve directly into the database to solve these issues.
We've also had certain isolated instances of user accounts disappearing, although this could be attributable to database corruption from the frequent server crashes.
And, to top things off, there's a bunch of stuff the staff would like to do with the forums and site, that is simply too hard to be worth it using the current forum.
So yeah, we're definitely looking into other options, both for pay (vb3) and free (IPB, phpBB). Whatever we decide on, you can be sure that it will be an improvement, even if it does take some getting used to. After all, even when you start to wear a new pair of shoes, you still tie those laces the same way. That's what we're aiming for - New Shoes for a Better HLP.
