New and enhanced message board platform coming soon! Much better mobile experience.

GopherHole Staff

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We are excited to announce that we will soon unveil a new message board platform on GopherHole. We are moving from the outdated vBulletin to the much more popular and better user experience of Xenforo. Your GopherHole username, password, post count, etc. will all transfer over, as should all threads and posts since 2008. New features are listed below, but one of the big and best new features is a much better mobile experience. We will no longer be using TapaTalk as the new platform will be responsive no matter which device you use. An example of a message board that uses the new Xenforo platform that we will move to is https://cyclonefanatic.com/forum/forums/football.9/.

When the transition happens, we request your patience to ensure we fix any glitches that may arise. If you have any direct questions you can post them in this thread or email us at [email protected].

Some of the Xenforo features versus VBulletin:

- Xenforo has drag and drop image uploading which is much more intuitive.

- You can mention a user by putting @ before their user name in a post. For example:
I'm not sure how to repair the widget, but @bobjones has done it so you may want to ask him
When you do this, user bobjones will receive an alert that he's been mentioned, so he knows to check out the post.

- Private Messages are similar, but are called "Conversations"

- In addition to email notifications, Xenforo has "alerts", which is a count of items related to their account next to their user name on the top/right of every page.

- Push notifications. Users can have notifications pushed to their desktop or phone (unfortunately this only works with Android phones for now). They do not have to have their browser or email open to know they've received a reply, conversation message, etc.

- Xenforo is fully responsive to screen size and will collapse menus and screen items based on screen size. When it collapses a menu, the menu tabs turn into a menu button which when clicked slides the menu into view from the left side of the screen.

- Xenforo has support for Emojis, so users have the ability to be expressive beyond whatever smilies are installed.

- Xenforo automatically embeds a Youtube video player in posts when users post a link to Youtube.

- Xenforo uses less system resources than VBulletin, so during busy forum times you generally won't see site response time impacted as much.

- Xenforo has stronger one way password encryption than VBulletin. The first time you log into Xenforo with your existing VBulletin user id and password, it will re-encrypt your password using the stronger Xenforo method.

- Because Xenforo is developed by former VBulletin developers, the overall feel of how to use the forum won't change much.
 


Will polls work? Know you cant view polls on tapatalk

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
 

Will this be equivalent in performance to the current site with Tapatalk? The current website, and most "modern" websites, are very slow on a phone, whereas Tapatalk is very fast.

Sent from my SM-N950U1 using Tapatalk
 

Will polls work? Know you cant view polls on tapatalk

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

You may know this, but in case you don’t, you can always ‘tap’ the ... in the upper right corner and select “web view”. It will open the page in your browser and you can view and vote in polls.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 




Wow.
This is great news.

Thanks so much for making the investment of time and money to do this!
 

Hopefully we’ll finally be able to edit thread titles. :p
 



now we can start all kind of threads arguing whether the new format is better than the old format. just like whether one coach is better than another coach......
 


Is there a timeline for the transition? When can I delete Tapatalk?
 

I am anxious to hear about the projected timeline.

I will look forward to "Liking" other's peoples posts.
 



Can we wait until after the season? Don't want to mess up our mojo ;)
Also, is there a way to donate to the site for all of the work you put in?
 



Will this be equivalent in performance to the current site with Tapatalk? The current website, and most "modern" websites, are very slow on a phone, whereas Tapatalk is very fast.

Sent from my SM-N950U1 using Tapatalk

The board operators that made the move to this new platform have all said very positive things about the mobile experience.
 

Is there a timeline for the transition? When can I delete Tapatalk?

We hope to be live within 10-14 days. We will let everyone know when they can delete Tapatalk.
 


Thank you, we appreciate it. We will be starting a formal donor drive within a few days. You can always donate at this link as well: https://main.gopherhole.com/page/show/383462-donate-to-gopherhole-com

Just a suggestion, another forum I view has a donate button right on the right side of all forums with the list of recent donors.
I think it's a good idea to get others to donate when they see other regular posters they argue with have recently posted.

When an opposing fan comes in like "Badgers#1" donates, it can spur a sequence of donations to get them off the list.
 



Can you only allow standard banner ads and not video ads that slow down site speed?
 

Sounds good, especially youtube synching....
 

When an opposing fan comes in like "Badgers#1" donates, it can spur a sequence of donations to get them off the list.

Hmm. Seems like a good idea but how do we know Nadine won't be donating as "Badgers#1" just to spur donations then? :cool:
 






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