One less than eight pieces of eight.

What are the eight pieces of nine?

Yeah don't rush man just let us k ow whats up when it goes down.

Alright, just gonna add my two cents to this whole migration idea...

"I feel that a fresh start will be necessary" Alright, it's your site, your word is word of God, but can you at least offer an explanation as to why? You mentioned something about "liking change" in the shoutbox but that doesn't seem particularly logical. SimpleMachines is extremely speedy and well organized, and the search function is simply unmatched. Huddler, vBulletin, phpBB, none of them can compare in speed and consistency.

"The forum software generally sucks and has certain limitations" -- Ok, I'll have to take your word on this one since I've never been on the other end of the experience. However, I know of several, much larger communities that manage just fine with SMF. As for archiving things for a fresh start, sure, that's fine with me. I just don't see a genuine need to change the site layout and GUI. The website doesn't look bad and it's not poorly organized; there's no reason the new resources at hand can't be put to expanding the framework we already have. Why fix what isn't broken?

I've used SimpleMachines forums for most of my computer life and while they have a sort of soft spot with me, its not unwarranted. My experience with other forums has simply been subpar by comparison, just littered with various inefficient layout schemes and unnecessarily large texts and containers, slow and intensive visual effects... website design has been getting worse and worse as time has gone on, it's all about who can be the flashiest instead of website layout efficiency and other aspects that actually matter and affect the end user experience.

I'd just really hate to see yet another forum I make extensive use of become a chore to interact with.

Peace.

Test drove vB5 Cloud. It sucks. Xenforo seems promising.

Why fix what isn't broken?

Maybe little things have been breaking behind the scenes and I've been spending too much time fixing them...

Maybe little things have been breaking behind the scenes and I've been spending too much time fixing them...

... that's called website administration, if you try and make things "perfect" to keep things from going wrong you're just going to be repeatedly disappointed

one of the first things my teacher told us when I was in school for network administration, a point which he reiterated countless times throughout the course, went something like this: "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, shit goes bump in the night, if you're not prepared for that you shouldn't be in this classroom; you shouldn't be working with computers at all"

but if it's becoming too difficult to manage, well, at least I tried to change your mind I guess. Get plenty of rest and take care.