Hi Jeff,
Thanks for the offer, but I’m OK really; and don’t need any financial support.
I’m “set for life” as they say; and don’t really need more financial resources, I’m lucky as they say, truly blessed; and do not view life as a game to get ‘richer and richer’.
Our site, according to a quick calculation, over its many years, from birth, to peak, and on to “long in the tooth”, has shown content from search results to over 500 million unique unregistered users, maybe more, I don’t track it so closely.
That “good karma” is enough for me, knowing we have helped so many people in need over long IT careers. That’s what it is all about for me (and I assume you as well), it’s not the money, it is the “good karma” of helping others in a tech forum. So, when we upgrade it to Discourse, it will be better for everyone, for sure. I could never code such a work-of-art like Discourse. I’m a cross-domain dabbler and a cybersecurity guy and systems engineer by trade, and am happily retired from public and professional life, for the most part.
The first test migration has gone much better than expected. I have found a few bugs and some things which are just issues unique to our site, like custom BBCODE tags. I can manage it all, it’s not a problem; and then I need to customize it for our community; so there will be some fun work to do there, and I’m looking forward to getting there and past migration 101.
Regarding vb3 there are certainly a lot of legacy vb3 communities out there and it’s great you are interesting in helping them. I agree that vbulletin.rb is not advanced enough to manage migrations for those less techie than us; as I find it the core vbulletin.rb “good enough” and I can easily modify it (and have been doing so as errors arise).
Let me get back to work on this; as I have to change some more things in vbulletin.rb to take into account the errors, which I have been logging in our site, in great detail as I go along. I need to get this done, and it will be done faster if I just do it for now.
Thanks again, for kind offer. All the notes on this, every step of the way, the good, the “not perfect”, and the great, will be over in this link, which I posted earlier
I’ll be happy to jump back in to meta after I get this phase done and dusted and have our users test it, and then give us their feedback. I am confident the majority will want us to move to Discourse and off our legacy… mess.
Thank you again for Discourse. I cannot say enough great things about your generous open source gift to the world.
Honestly, I don’t want to take away your valuable time on this and I realize vb3 is not fun for anyone anymore, and that is especially true for yours truly. I am hopeful that the heavy vb3 boat anchor will be lifted from my neck soon. I can manage it, no problem, I think.
Again, hat’s off to you and the Discourse team for Discourse and thank you and your team for the basic vbulletin.rb migration script. It’s not a problem at all the bugs. If it was too easy, it would not be as interesting!
Actually, the migration is already working fine, but I need to write more custom code for our custom BBCODE and fix a few bugs here and there and run it all again!
Thanks again!