- Joined
- Dec 29, 2002
- Messages
- 17,285
- Reaction score
- 2,634
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- He/Him
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- #1
The current incarnation of the Bulbagarden Forums has been around now for over 23 years. Practically every year, we've made a few new forum styles available, with new styles added celebrating new generations of game releases, major milestones for the site, and various seasonal events.
In late 2015, we changed our forums software from vBulletin to Xenforo. That change happened rather abruptly, with our hand being forced due to a major security breach we'd suffered with vBulletin, and as such we hadn't had the time to fully test a lot of things, nor to convert the forum styles over to Xenforo. The style system in Xenforo at the time was also extremely convoluted, requiring a lot of work to get even simple styles converted. And so, a lot of our classic styles from 2002-2015 got left by the wayside. We'd always intended to come back to them someday, but style creation was time consuming, and there were always other things taking priority.
Today however, with all the work we've put into the recent Xenforo 2.3.x upgrade and converting styles for that, we think it's finally time to start bringing back some of those classic styles. Style creation has gotten a lot easier in recent years, and with the recent style work we've been doing our team is probably more familiar with the backend functions for this than we've ever been with Xenforo.
So here's where you come in. Take a look at the screenshots of these classic styles from our vBulletin era below (all of which were made in late 2015 looking at the Welcome Center category), and let us which of these you'd most like to see come back. Just click the thumbnails to view each image at full size.
For veteran users, please note that not all of our classic styles have been included on the list for this particular vote (in fact, quite a lot of them haven't been), so it's possible your fave style isn't here. While it's my hope to eventually make every single style we've ever had available in some form, some classic styles were intentionally excluded for now due to being too similar to styles we already have, or being seasonal styles that should really come back at the appropriate time of year.
In late 2015, we changed our forums software from vBulletin to Xenforo. That change happened rather abruptly, with our hand being forced due to a major security breach we'd suffered with vBulletin, and as such we hadn't had the time to fully test a lot of things, nor to convert the forum styles over to Xenforo. The style system in Xenforo at the time was also extremely convoluted, requiring a lot of work to get even simple styles converted. And so, a lot of our classic styles from 2002-2015 got left by the wayside. We'd always intended to come back to them someday, but style creation was time consuming, and there were always other things taking priority.
Today however, with all the work we've put into the recent Xenforo 2.3.x upgrade and converting styles for that, we think it's finally time to start bringing back some of those classic styles. Style creation has gotten a lot easier in recent years, and with the recent style work we've been doing our team is probably more familiar with the backend functions for this than we've ever been with Xenforo.
So here's where you come in. Take a look at the screenshots of these classic styles from our vBulletin era below (all of which were made in late 2015 looking at the Welcome Center category), and let us which of these you'd most like to see come back. Just click the thumbnails to view each image at full size.
For veteran users, please note that not all of our classic styles have been included on the list for this particular vote (in fact, quite a lot of them haven't been), so it's possible your fave style isn't here. While it's my hope to eventually make every single style we've ever had available in some form, some classic styles were intentionally excluded for now due to being too similar to styles we already have, or being seasonal styles that should really come back at the appropriate time of year.
