An Important Note to Our Valued Commenters from Bob

[TwinSwords]

Originally Posted by Brenda

You're right that this was the key reason for the switch. And it's not just the money. We never found a really good programmer to maintain the custom "bridge" between vBulletin and the videopage, so we were severely restricted in our ability to stay current on upgrades to both the website's content management system and vBulletin itself. And that led to security problems, and usability problems, and ... well, it just got untenable in the end.

Hi Brenda,
If you don't mind my asking - how often was it necessary to do that work of maintaining/updating the bridge between vBulletin and the videopage? When Bob first explained this, I assumed it was pretty infrequent. My impression was that redesigns were pretty rare things and that once the bridge was established for any given version of BhTV, it would be good to go for quite a while. Is that not right?

I understand the concerns about cost problems, and security problems. But I think you have more usability problems now (with Disqus) than you did before with vBulletin.

Disqus is for people to toss off one liners, not to carry on extended, in depth discussions. As we have already seen with the Open Thread where the redesign is being talked about, each time a new comment is posted it takes a lot of work just to scan up and down the thread to find the new comment. It's way more work (usability problem) than users are going to endure.

The nice thing about vBulletin was you could stand in one spot and see all the threads with new posts. Jumping from active thread to active thread was a breeze. With Disqus, it will never again be possible to keep up with several discussions in several threads.

For those of us who have loved hanging out here over the years, this is a really devastating loss.