Press “Log in” in the upper right hand corner of the site.
Press “I forgot my password” even if you still know your password. vBulletin and Discourse have incompatible password storing/hashing algorithms, so there was no way to transfer over your old passwords.
Enter your old username or your registration email, and a new password will be mailed to you. (You can change it to whatever you want, of course!)
A note on usernames with spaces, special characters, etc.
Discourse has different rules for account names. They’re limited to letters, numbers, and underscores. As a result, when we migrated all the accounts over, incompatible names went through an automated renaming process. For example, the account Jeff Wheeler became Jeff_Wheeler.
For names that run particularly afoul of the new naming rules, like λ, it can be tricky to find the automatically-generated username. In these cases, it’s best to use your email to reset your password. (Although I’m not sure if you still need to know your username then.) If you’re having trouble, you can always contact @kirupa or @krilnon and they can find your new name.
(It turns out that λ’s new name is 955, because the HTML character entity for λ is λ, and those first two characters aren’t allowed.)
On Missing Posts
You may notice that certain posts you thought you remembered making are apparently not here. Unfortunately, the import script that comes with Discourse doesn’t fully handle the complexities of a huge, decade+ vB forum, so some posts weren’t imported. We plan to keep a read-only version of the old vB kF around so that you can still find those posts if necessarily, and we’ll continue to improve the backlog here on Discourse.
If a missing post happens to be a question you asked that you want to bump up, you can also feel free to copy your old post content over, just so that people can see and reply to it immediately here.
Kirupa had many things going for it: one of them was a great vB ran forum community with a great UI and UX.
Now it sucks. It is not an excuse to say you could not migrate as is. With all the new “hip” and “cool” react frameworks and JS movements - a simple migration could not happen.
This just demonstrates the over engineering and lack of experience the industry has churned into to!
All the JS confs and could’nt even give a smooth forum migration
All of the data did get migrated. What didn’t were some of the username associations and related connections for OLD content. Because 99% of all activity is in topics created within 365 days, focusing a bunch of effort on old content didn’t seem reasonable. Solving it would have required over engineering something and nobody wanted to do that.
Is there something that you are missing that the old forums had?
Humble to receive your reply. Actually it is more than just a forum migration. I think it’s the way things have evolved away from Flash and generally web development and design. I love React like the next person and love PHP and old school ways as sometimes more than often; they work.
Ruby on Rails tried to come to Twitter. It failed because it does not scale so they re-coded to Java. If they started and someone said Java, he would have been frowned on by naive generations.
Going back to this forum; why did you feel you need to remove vBulletin? vBulletin is a fantastic forum that scales well and the UI and UX works. It has worked for over a decade. Sure there can be some modern tweaks; I recently posted on their the lack of PWA and APIs for React; they had no clue what any of it was:
The UI and UX on this place just feels out of place - the user pages, the ease of editing things, it feels to fast and to light. The forum structure of old subtopics and categories - this is not stackoverflow
The ease of things used to be much better in vBulletin and it felt more communal. More texture and more warm.
My biggest gripe with vBulletin is that it is archaic. It doesn’t work on mobile. Search was pretty much always broken. Authentication was only through username and password, which was a major security hassle. Worse, there was no interest from the vBulletin team in fixing any of these issues. Discourse addresses all of these. The service worker part of a PWA is provided. AMP is something that can be setup if needed. The community is very responsive, and the updates have made discourse much better with each monthly release.
Discourse is new, so it will take some getting used to, but it fits with the workflow much better if you are used to Facebook, Twitter, and (of course) StackOverflow. You subscribe to tags, and for everything else, you search. There is a category/topic view that mimics vBulletin, but I have that option disabled. You can see what that looks like here: https://twittercommunity.com/
The communal and warmth has more to do with the people themselves than the technology underlying it. At least, that’s what it seems like to me based on the various communities I’ve looked at.
For the project I am working on: React, Gatsby and Contentful - JamStack. Some of the API and services we use PHP and JSON APIs. Some we have Node systems. Were trying to collate our microservices together and move ideally, entirely to a Javascript ecosystem.
Company intranet and some of my other projects will stay vB - go to love that arcade module
Thanks