The new forum did some of the things you guys are asking for. Alot of people commented on this brief rollout that lasted just a couple hours. Everyone says don't change it "but" can you add this or that. Those this or thats are the features the new upgrade had. It was just an ugprade from our 2.x version to the latest 3.x version. With that came some great features and better usability. Nothing seems more "usable" when you have a small learning curve on it though until the curve passes at which point it is easy again.

As far as the lockout. That was a HUGE blunder by me. I failed to push a critical login file on rollout by mistake. The file I was supposed to push had the same name but ended in an "s" and that small blunder caused all the login issues. Once that was solved people were getting on but I had other performance issues reported by a subset of users and some broken image issues from a complex load balancer configuration which I believe had something slightly off.

This rollout was to make for a better user experience for the users. Nobody can really judge it until they see it performing as it is supposed to and not in its broken state. Also you need more then a a few minutes or hour to see all the deeper functionality the new software affords.

Because of the performance which is my #1 priority always (I need speed and compatibility on my apps) we are delaying any rollout and exploring adding some of the features from the new forum and custom coding them into this.

People above talk about motivation. It is very simple. We are owners, programmers AND most importantly users of this site. We are RC'ers like you. We want the best there is for everyone. I am sure you realize that we would not do anything to harm the site or lead our users to not want to enjoy the site. With that in mind you can either trust that the minds that built what you have and love today will get it right and make your RC home the best here. We may not get it right immediately or perfect but those who have been here for 5 or 10 years know that we are a moving target always and we want to push the site forward to keep up.

A long time ago they said the horse and buggy wasn't broken so don't fix it. Now we have cars. A long time ago they said candles were just fine and no need to change. Now we have lightbulbs. RCU does not want to become a horse and buggy and be left behind and leave our users wondering what happened. Were newspapers broken? No but as many know they are now going out of business. The internet came along and those that adapted and changed will emerge while those who said let's just stick with what we have are going away FAST. Somebody wise once said if you aren't moving forward, you are moving backward.

Let's just keep all this in mind and I assure everyone we won't do anything that is not for the best interest of the sites users. Sometimes it may not seem that way to you immediately but quickly it will become apparent. When it turns out that something isn't in the best interest just the same we also move quickly to fix it.