YaBB SE site closing down

[David]

While I do feel sad that a portion of my life will be closing at the end of March, I am very excited about a new part.  We have taken a lot of your advice into account both about SMF and how to make this transition.  We have left this site open much longer than originally planned but there has to be a time when it is over.  We do not have the resources to maintain two sites especially with support and moderation issues.  We are sorry that some of you feel that this transition is not in your best interest and we have done our best to try to convince you otherwise.  We understand that there are some "alternatives" to upgrading to SMF that still run off of the YaBB SE codebase but the official YaBB SE project will be closing on March 31st.  Thank you all for the experiences I have had the opportunity to share with you and I hope to see all of you in the future as part of the Simple Machines community.

[[Unknown]]

I would like to make one simple assertion:

If you are running an older version of YaBB SE, or have not upgraded to SMF as of when the public beta is released... chances are you have not been to the site.  If you haven't been the site, you wouldn't miss any of the boards that are gone or even all of them if they were to evaporate.

For most people, a viable and easy solution to support issues is... simply... to upgrade.  As far as the mods issue, well, frankly... if you are experienced enough to make such modifications, you may not really miss the support here.

If you do, well, you'll have to weigh things.  Maybe you have a '52 automobile that you've made ten times faster than it was originally, but a modern car will always out-race it.  At some point, you're going to have to decide to upgrade or be left in the dust.

Now, don't misunderstand this.  If anyone ever has a problem with a YaBB SE forum, even five years from now, I and others are willing to help.  But at some point, outdated software has to be dropped.... Microsoft doesn't still support Windows For Workgroups 3.11, do they?

As to people who can't upgrade due to requirements... at some point they will also have to weigh how worth their money the host is.  Even lycos.co.uk runs SMF perfectly and wonderfully fine - even the package manager and attachments - so if you're being hosted and PAYING for it, and they won't upgrade.... obviously it's time to change hosts.

-[Unknown]

[David]

One last thing to add to this, in the process of pruning this forum you may have received access denied or unavailable errors.  We have not however banned opposition to this idea nor altered our ban list in many weeks.  We truly do respect everyone's opinions and feedback and know that banning a user will not make their concerns disappear.