I do not like bugs. At all.

That night it was very hard for me to fall asleep. I kept checking and rechecking my bed and in fact didn’t fall asleep until one am. This happened the following night as well. Absolutely petrified to get under the covers. This is worse than the time a giant moth was in my room and we never found its body. I really do not like bugs.

In less buggy news, I am in love with orange soda. I like working with IPB skins. So I thought, orange soda theme. Oh yeah. Anyway I haven’t actually made much progress on it yet, probably because I discovered orange is very…orange. But hopefully on next day off I’ll be able to focus on it.

Hi, I'm orange

Jelsoft developers spoke of vBulletin 4, but then one day it was revealed that no actual work had been on 4, just talk. New, rather useless and/or ill implemented features were being added to the 3.x line, features that screamed “I want to be MySpace!”. There was the Ad Sense fiasco. Oh, not to mention price raises for both the product and renewal. And of course, the now infamous leak. Not only was vB4′s rewrite going to take years longer than expected, but Internet Brands seemed bound and determined to drive away long time customers.
After seeing version 4 in action I have to say I would be very disappointed if I had paid for that script. And when 5 comes around you’ll have to pay $$$ all over again!

On the IPB side, I recently added my voice to those who wanted a soft delete feature in IP.Board. After a couple of weeks a developer blog update showed that the team had made progress on implementing this into 3.1. That isn’t to say they stick in everything people request, but what they do is give feedback on their feedback. That is to say, if something won’t be added they explain why. They also ask for clarification of feature requests so they have a better idea of what the user is actually asking for, how’d they like it to work within the existing forum etc.

phpBB were, and probably still are, good with talking about their current development. They were just really stubborn and seemed to be focusing on how they themselves would administer a forum and maybe not so much on the end user experience. vBulletin seemed just as focused on trying to attract MySpace users to use VB powered forums, without really thinking things through. IPB seems to be trying to refine what they have before adding onto it, which is also something phpBB did. I guess when it comes down to it phpBB’s lack of spam protection is what makes me not really like being an admin of that software. I would pick MyBB over it. But even so, that free script is able to give better communication than vBulletin PR? I don’t even mean the guys behind the scenes busy coding, I mean people who are supposedly getting paid to talk to the customers.

Oh oh oh oh! I don’t know if it is obvious but I love reading about drama involving scripts! I did the same thing when Joomla! came into being, and now it seems SMF are going through some issues. There is the standstill in development and management issues. I never paid much attention to SMF because I find it ugly and confusing, so a lot of this is kind of “dur” for me, but still…drama drama drama.

I am also on the hunt for a new computer. My last two have been laptops but this next one will be a desktop; desktops are easier to upgrade and improve upon, not to mention more bang for the buck. I was thinking that maybe one day I’ll invest in a netbook (oh how trendy) for something easy to move around with and do basic things like email, Word, surfing, etc. I’m looking forward to a new computer because then I can use newer version of Photoshop (Nik can help me out with that I’m sure…) and being able to play Sims 3 in my bedroom and not in view of the whole family.

I bought a hot glue gun today and hot glue sueded Caraline.  It  makes a difference, let me tell you. Of course now she’s a wee bit squeaky, hehe, but I’m the only one to hear. I mean she’s a doll, it’s not like she’s going to be walking around. Or if she is, at least now you can hear her coming which is a scary thought so I’ll just leave it there.

I’m halfway through the forth book of A Song of Ice and Fire.

My hair grew longer.

The thing that is so horrible about the pre-sale is that there is NO demo, NO live site anywhere that shows this new VB, and you are basically paying for vaporware. Some argue given the software’s history you are purchasing on faith, except the vast majority of the team that made VB what it is are now gone. One former member’s twitter post about watching a train wreck doesn’t really build one’s confidence in the future of the company.

Basically Internet Brands wants me to spend $180 (or more) every couple of years in order to have access to the most stable vBulletin version. IP.Board costs $150 plus renewals, however unlike VB they have this history of honoring previous license agreements. So even if they changed ala VB if you bought your board before the change nothing will happen to your agreement with the company. I find this so ironic because one of the primary reasons I choose VB over IPB was because I felt Jelsoft (which for all intents and purposes is no more) was more of an honorable company than IPB.

To be frank IPB didn’t handle their going from a free script to paid solution very well. Not very well at all, in fact. And yet it seems as this years draws on VB keeps sending new customers their way. Indeed, nowadays it seems Internet Brands is the best thing to have happened to IPB.

But converting isn’t easy. As an end user I am far more familiar with VB than any other board software except maybe phpBB albeit the phpBB 2 series. Not to mention I have no real idea how hard or easy it would be to skin IPB, although I can’t see it being any more of a pain in the ass than the current VB. I’d have to make a new style for version four anyway.

This whole situation is so disappointing. Thank god I renewed VB right when I did because this announcement came out not even a full week later. So if I feel inclined I can download VB 4, but then when next October rolls around I’d have to cough up the $180 to continue to receive updates. I suppose that means I have a year to decide/get used to the idea of converting. Even so, I was semi-looking forward to the new VB. They had some nifty improvements planned, just not nifty enough to justify the increased cost. And a lot of the features they were pimping weren’t even things I cared for, like SEO links and removing valuable info from the HTML title of threads (like the Page 1, Page 2 stuff).

It is becoming more clear as the days wear on that Internet Brands doesn’t give two sticks about their customers.

ETA: Someone has broken down the new pricing plan.

Back in May there was a mess up with permissions on the official forums and details about future plans were revealed to the public. When this hit I was floored and more than a touch angry. Recently IB has come out and stated that if one has an active license when vB4 is released they can download it under the current terms.

The entire thing is just disappointing because vB4 is not a complete rewrite (yet) so the idea of having to pay for it again was just…ugh. Right before the leak I had been trying to get excited about it, mostly thinking of the new style. I’m still looking forward to an easier way to skin the forum, good lord am I ever. But their SEO features are not really something I care for, especially since one of the changes that has been proposed isn’t really for the better: getting rid of page numbers in the title of threads you’re browsing. Hopefully they have rethought that or at least have made it an option. In general I really don’t care much for SEO dodads, but the sitemap feature will be nice.

All that is to say that vB4 wasn’t all that exciting before the leak and during the three months of IB stalling giving any sort of response, things were looking dimmer. One of the reasons I went with VB over IPB was the attitude of IPB, specifically how they handled going from “free forever!” to a payed solution. IB’s attitude about the leak was almost enough to make me switch, except IPB3 at the time didn’t have its payed subscription manager up and running yet. Not to mention converting can be a real pain in the ass. However the fact that I even went over to their site and checked out what they offered was probably the biggest sign of how much IB screwed up. Plenty of other forum owners just went ahead and made the plunge to switch.

Still, in all likelihood I will be upgrading to vB4, we’ll see about version five when it gets here. I’m hoping IB doesn’t disappoint further when they finally release the pricing info. It really shouldn’t be taking them this long, but I figured when the leak happened they’d wait until the last minute and so far looks like I’m right.

I haven’t been working on my Civilization mod for awhile, mostly because I’m trying to become better at the Warlords difficulty setting. Not that I have been playing all too much either recently.

I have begun my WOT reread. It’s not going too fast, or as fast as usual, but that might be because a) I’m not reading every day and b) when I do read I’m doing a more close-reading a là college cramming. The other problem might be out of the whole series New Spring and Eye of the World are books I’ve read more than the others.

Changed hosts. My new host uses DirectAdmin instead of cPanel, which might take some getting used to, but so far it is fine. One thing I really like is that each domain gets its own folder. With cPanel you needed WHM to do that, which usually cost more than regular cPanel. Even so, I still need to have a moiraine.meandraine.net subdomain for now, otherwise my redirect rule via .htaccess won’t work: it’ll just show an error page.

For some reason my vBulletin database is larger on this host than the last one. Don’t know why. Also, my disk usage meter has close to 40mb of data I can’t account for. I’ve waited a couple of days before sending in a ticket to ask about that. My other tickets (one for sales, others for transfer) have gotten answered nice and fast, so hopefully the same will be true here. So far, I am very happy with new host.

Also, MW forums aren’t down every 30 minutes. This is a nice change.

I’m kind of rambling here….

I need to find boxers for Elnore for two reasons: 1) It’s a part of her character, and 2) They’ll help keep her pants up. Caraline needs a new wig, and there is one girl who makes fur wigs that I like, but of course she is closed!

I want to go to Europe.

I am so behind the times. vBulletin has raised its prices across the board. Renewals for owned licenses (the renewals are for support/downloads of latest releases) is now $60. Unless you do it two months before it expires then it is $40. It used to be $30 no matter when you renewed. I liked the old way better, because vBulletin seems to have taken a page out of phpBB’s book on updates. That is, 4.0 is really no where in sight. Hopefully there is some information soon.

I have no desire to update to 3.7, since that release seems geared more towards those who want their communities to be more like MySpace. I don’t want more bloat, I want a more streamlined vBulletin forum. I don’t regret moving away from phpBB to vBulletin, especially considering how long it took them to come out with 3.0. But my reasons for moving to the other guys was for forum features (merging,splitting,better spam protection) not SEO.

I’m still enjoying Civilization IV. I’m not sure whether I have found a little bug with my Westlands mod or not: in the Civilopedia it shows that one of Tar Valon’s unique units upgrades to one of Andor’s unique units. Obviously that is not how it is suppose to go. I will look into further once my current game is over. The goal is to clean up what I have now, refine the leaders, and then add new leaders to the current custom civs. After that, I will add new civs/leaders.

And because I feel like adding pictures (as always click for bigger):

Also, I installed Gallery to my doll site: which isn’t public, and there’s nothing there anyway, I’m just getting it ready for whenever I do decide to work on it. I’m going to have to work a bit (read: a lot) on the gallery’s CSS to make it match the rest of the site. Oh that should be fun!

I’m wondering a bit about what I’m going to do next year. I have all these vacation plans! So I’ll need to make sure whatever job I get I can get off work easy enough.

And that’s all for now! Will make another update later.

I’ve been thinking of finally converting the MW site into a CMS. The thing is, is I’d have to find one that does just what I want and no more. But it can’t be so bare bones that I’d wish I had stayed with HTML.

I have a headache and that’s all.