The Road to vBulletin: Semi-Open Beta Testing

Some of you may recall that we have been talking about a move to vBulletin from FuseTalk on our forums. This has taken a bit longer than I had hoped, but the transition is still in progress. We are cleaning up some things and planning others and we've got test servers up and running with a fully imported and working database.

We are currently working on getting the look and feel right as well as cleaning up some importation crud. We may not test with our final stylesheets and layout, but we will have customized look that fits in with the current AnandTech page and reflects much of what we've heard people like about the current layout. Emoticons and things like italics, underline and highlight are broken in the import right now and a simple script should clean it up after everything is caught and gathered together. We should have that stuff finished up fairly soon.

And then the more exciting stuff happens.

Before we make the switch, we want to be sure that we won't be surprised by anything totally out of left field. We are going to run a beta test of our server to make sure everything works as expected, to get user feedback and just to make sure the sky doesn't start falling as soon as we open the floodgates.

I'm not exactly sure how large a pool of members I want for our beta test right now. I don't want it too big but I want enough people pounding on it so that we catch most of the problems we will run into (as there are always problems we will run into). I'm also looking at limiting beta participants to current forum members who meet certain criteria. Specifically we'll be allowing members who have been registered for at least 3 months as of now and who have been at least somewhat active with a 100 post count minimum.

We are opening applications for the beta server now, just head over to this thread in the forums and post a reply. We're looking for as many people as are interested and we will decided how many to include in the beta test based on response and need. That said, it will be first come first serve if we decide to cap the number of participants.

I'm sorry it's taken so long for us to get to this point, but we're headed into the final stretch. I wish I could set a firm date right now, but as always we are more concerned with getting it right than just getting it done. Thanks everyone for you patience, and I hope it will be well worth the wait when we're finished.