GenVibe - Community for Pontiac Vibe Enthusiasts

It has been 10 years since GVC first launched and we have been on the Zeroforum platform for the entire time. When we launched, the company that owned GVC had a formal relationship with Rely.net, who was making the ZF software as a package you could download and install, and they would support (interestingly the spellcheck feature was always a hosted service).7 or 8 years ago GVC and Zeroforum split ways (technically what happened was that vwvortex.com split from GVC, and the Zeroforum/rely.net relationship went with it). Some time after that, ZF stopped offering a software package at all - they only offered a hosted service that was prohibitively expensive for our small site.ZF as a company is no more as far as I can tell based on 3 minutes of google research.I'm in the process of contracting with a company called gConverter that will convert the site from ZeroForum to phpBB. I have done some google searches to see what people's satisfaction is with the company and the results seem to be generally good. Their website says that they are based in Wyoming but it also says that you get fastest results if you are in their timzone (GMT+2, aka Eastern Europe), so I'm guessing their team is mostly overseas which is why their rates are so competitive. I know that the File Attachement feature of ZF is a little unusal (phpBB3 might have it, I don't know), but I asked gConverter if file attachements will be preserved, and they said yes.I hope to get the work done in the next 2 weeks once I have gotten the full details from them.There will definitely be some growing pains, people are very used to ZF and we do have a few enhancements (Registry) that will require some extra work to port over, but I think that we will all benefit from moving to a platform that is current, supported, has available add-ons and gets security updates. (And is based on 2012 technology, rather than 2002).I will do my best to make information available on the website when I have more information. Thanks for your patience!I'm always glad to see we are still regularly getting new members to our community, and look forward to the next 10 years.

The "GVC Announcements" forum is pretty low on the homepage so I figured I would provide a link here... http://forums.genvibe.com/zerothread?id=46690

I keep looking for the "like" link. Sounds like the next logical progression, to be sure. Here's to the future of GVC!

As long as we keep everything, of course I'm all for it! Thanks for all your work, Mike.

I've made it through all the beeps, boops, 1s, and 0s of this topic post and can only assume positive benefits. Any GVC fan should be along for the... wait for it... ride on this one. [rimshot] Thank you, Mike.

Awesome! I'm looking forward to the "NEW" GenVibe!

Good news! Thanks for all your work on this Mike!

Change is coming, all righty!!!I look forward to posting many more pics of my usually filthy car on here!!!

Crossed fingers for a smooth and uneventful transition, Mike.*edit* OH, and I'll second what Brian (Blue Crush) said too.And thanks for letting us know in advance. That's better communication than I usually get at my regular job.

Anything we can do to help?

Not to confuse things but have you looked at this?http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/I'm also on a forum GM-Trucks.com and they use that software.Here are some stats for that forum:1,231,398 Total Posts98,478 Total Members1,047 Users Online Now2,532 Most OnlineOne thing I wish for is pic hosting within the site. It gets to be depressing to view a super interesting thread and the pics are no long available. Especially when I'm right in the middle of that project and need that "how-to" snapshot.BTWHow is GVC being supported financially?

The forum I'm a moderator on went from phpbb to vbulletin, it was interesting to see the change from that perspective. I imagine going from an antiquated and unsupported piece of software like ZF to something new would be quite a task. Mike, I know you have a lot of hard work ahead that us users will never see. Let us know if there is anything we can do to help!Here's to everything going smoothly.

Hope that the conversion goes well (and that you have a good backup )Looking forward to exploring the new site.

...two comments:1) CHANGE for the 'sake' of change alone is BAD.2) CHANGE due to 'necessity' alone is RISKY....because of #2 above, I heartedly endorse the statement "...hope you have a good backup..."

One of the nice things about hosting with AWS (amazon) is that we can easily take a snapshot of the whole server (configuration, disks, etc.) and rebuild it from that snapshot as necessary.It's currently looking like this work will start midnight tonight and last 36 hours, but I don't have final confirmation from gconverter yet.Mike K.