Hi all,

We are experiencing some serious growing pains with the current SMF software platform that we have been using since the site's inception 4 years ago (next week!). In fact, some of you may have noticed that the site was down most of the day a couple of weeks ago. Long story short, some of the plugins (like the photo gallery) that we use for this forum have not been updated and will no longer be updated, and they leave breaches for access into our servers by spammers whose actions can harm the forum.

We are currently testing some available packages. We want to go with a package that has more functionality than this software but will still be fun and easy to navigate, keeping the clean look and community feel of this site. After having evaluated several options, we are leaning towards vbulletin. I am in the process of installing a test version of this software with an old version of the forum so the staff can look at everything closely.

I am actually partial to this software, having used it several years ago when I was an administrator on another MD site. Several of the staff here were on the staff there as well, and we really liked the functionality and look.

When this process is worked through (within the next several days), we will move to the new platform. There will be changes in look and feel but I think many of you are familiar with vbulletin, as it is used by a huge number of forums on the internet, including some familiar MD forums.

We just wanted to keep everyone posted of the progress. When we have an exact date of the transfer I will post more here. It should involve very little downtime.

Please feel free to post any questions here.

Thank you!

The AD Staff