Prepare yourselves, the old skins are going bye bye!


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You guys do need to realize that it is simply impractical for us to port all of our old skins. It's not because we think "change is good", although this one will be. The real reason is that we need to start IPB from scratch. Simple as that. We will have a database to work with, and that will need to be upgraded. The rest is 100% new code. Not only are our current themes useless, but all of our PHP hacks will need to be rewritten too.

It wouldn't simply be a matter of copying and pasting a few skins to IPB3. It would be remaking each and every one so that it could work with the new IPB3 features. Our hands are tied, and when so few people actually use those skins, it simply isn't worth it. We have statistics... basically no one uses the skins, especially when you take into account how many thousands of people use the site daily and are happy enough with Finity.

I understand your attachments to the old skins, but as developers we don't have time to do all of that for a select few users. It usually comes down to one, maybe two people doing the skins, and we think we can put that time to better use. You'll see what I mean.

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Just try Finity for a week and if you are anything like me, will quickly forget about Shift or won't even realize you are using Finity anymore.
Except for all the unnecessary white space I have to scroll through...
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Small point:

When you opened a closed thread in Shift you would see that the reply button, now carrying the text "closed", was a little faded. This is not done with the Infinity skin. Is there a reason for this action? I always thought it gave something extra and you could easily notice that the thread was closed. :blush:

Just asking, definitely no critique.

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  • 2 months later...

So... Now that IPB 3.0.0 has been released, when will you guys make the transition? Will you guys also release a new Neowin Mobile webapp along side the transition? The current webapp is outdated and does not work on iPhone OS 3.0, it only works on 2.2.1 and below.

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for while i did not like the finity skin but i got used to it, the old skins need to go, why have something around when posters won't use?

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Personally I look forward to seeing what our devs come up with, IPB3 opens up a lot of possibilities in skinning terms

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Personally I look forward to seeing what our devs come up with, IPB3 opens up a lot of possibilities in skinning terms

Me too. It's going to be interesting to see what is going to happen.

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I'd expect the guys who control Neowin are waiting for 3.0.1 to arrive, which according to IPB staff is 'Quite soon'. So I'd recommend waiting on that. Numerous problems occur when upgrading to 3.0 anyway, including the breaking of most BBCodes.

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I'd expect the guys who control Neowin are waiting for 3.0.1 to arrive, which according to IPB staff is 'Quite soon'. So I'd recommend waiting on that. Numerous problems occur when upgrading to 3.0 anyway, including the breaking of most BBCodes.

I'm pretty sure they'll start upgrading step by step. This forum has a lot of self-written modifications which all - or at least, many - have to be re-written. It will take time to develop those modifications, the skin and other aspects needed before they can upgrade. However, I'll be waiting as I'm more anxious for the new skin instead of the whole update.

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I like Shift for the Forum and not Finity, but Finity for the main page.

So OS terms, im sticking to XP(ironically lol) and Finity ='s Vista. So I hope the new theme will be Windows 7(a blend of both).

Anyway, OS Metaphors aside, I hope you guys make it a nice theme. Shift and Finity! Remember that!

Shinity? Fift? lol Shifty?

anyway, reading through this whole topic gave me such flashbacks of programming Myboard, VBulitin, and other forum software ive used, and it was generally just me and one or two other guys, granted we never had a userbase as large as neowin, but i understand upgrade and porting processes, i had enough one day and left the "internetz" behind for several months.

Anyway, i Hope you Dev guys don't go nutz, just have fun and make a great forum, thats all we can really ask as users

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IPB 3.0 is missing stuff like the Subscriber management, which we really do need as you'll know.. We won't be on 3.0 but we'll most likely be on 3.0.1 or later version.

The new IPB is good, but it still doesn't have most of our custom hacks which members have gotten used to and will miss if we just go and upgrade to Vanilla IPB and do a skin later.

Remember that we also didn't upgrade to 2.0 for months after it came out, because of the amount of work it requires to upgrade.

Those commenting about the slow DB, this is still be looked into and we've made significant improvements already, and from my understanding, 3.0 has been coded specifically to help large sites much more than 2.0 versions :D

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  • 2 weeks later...
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