New Forum FAQ

You can post it in this thread or send me a PM or post your suggestions in any thread that I created - I'll get notifications and read your posts.

You can use the same credentials (username and password) you have always used to log in to 2+2. Or you can login using Gmail, but your google email has to be the same as the one associated with your 2+2 account.

If you use your Gmail account to log in and the email address is different from the one associated with your 2+2 account, you won't be able to log in under your nickname.

The old forum is a VBulletin forum.
The new forum is a new piece of software coded from scratch by the owners of 2+2 (me and Andrew).

It’s a little bit more complicated than “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We need software we fully control so we can easily and quickly add new features. We can’t do that with a VBulletin forum. We have a vision for how to make 2+2 more popular. Without our own piece of software, we can’t implement our vision.

• Feed. It’s good for new users to quickly find interesting content.
• Second-level posting, where some posts are hidden inside a parent post, is a good way to declutter threads. The implementation might not be perfect, but we are working on it.
• I like the search feature. It searches by meaning, not just by the exact text you typed.
• Notifications. When someone replies to you or likes your post, you’ll see a notification.

There might be a few bugs, and certain UI elements might not be intuitive. We are working on that.
New UI might need getting used to. I suspect that the longer you've used the old forum—especially if you're still using the original skin—the more you're going to hate how the new forum looks. For me, adaptation was relatively quick: just a week or two, and now, when I go back to the old forum, I feel uncomfortable, which means my brain actually prefers the new one.

When someone creates a thread on the new forum, it is displayed as a link on the old one. It’s not possible to read that thread by staying on the old forum. Think about it—if a new forum offers more features (second-level posts, more text formatting, etc.), then how can such a thread be shown on the old forum? Threads created on the new forum offer the full capabilities of the new forum and can’t be duplicated on the old forum.
However, threads created on the old forum are duplicated on the new one without the new forum’s full capabilities.

We have invested a lot of time trying to synchronize the forums so that, for the most part, you can remain on the old forum. We researched many examples of how different companies rolled out new versions, and more often than not, it was a fiasco. As far as we know, nobody has done what we are attempting to do here—gradually introduce a new forum.

I’m afraid that, eventually, you will have to use it or stop using 2+2 altogether. Think about it: if we (the owners) succeed in attracting new users to the new forum and transitioning existing users to it, then a time will come when most people will be using the new forum and most threads will be created there. This would leave you only with the old threads on vBulletin, and everything new would require navigating to the new forum.

If we fail, we will not continue investing resources and time in the old vBulletin forum; instead, we will move on to something else. 2+2 will probably be sold, and I seriously doubt that any potential buyers will continue with vBulletin.