vBulletin v3.8.0

[Nords]

I hate to disturb a stable status quo with a disruptive upgrade, but this one seems worth the effort.

Another vBulletin board (HawaiiThreads.com) has been using v3.8.0 for a while and just started experimenting with social groups. It's a much better interface than v3.7.4, for example HawaiiThreads.com - Change of Status . It includes a drop-down bar labeled "Discussion tools". Similar to "Thread tools", it allows members to subscribe to that social group's discussions. If users could subscribe to E-R.org's social group threads then I wouldn't have to send out PMs to 50 addressees (five addressees at a time) notifying them of updates to the group's discussion.

It looks like v3.8.0 also allows multiple threads on one social group. The group's summary screen (HawaiiThreads.com - hawaii-test) also includes "Group Tools", which I guess allow a user to subscribe to the entire group's activity instead of just individual discussions. Again, a great feature that eliminates the need to keep checking social groups for new content.

The v3.8.0 albums & pictures features are still too small and don't allow other file types. But I've managed to work around that issue and I don't need them anymore.

One upgrade glitch: v3.8.0 wiped out a lot of the HawaiiThreads custom-uploaded avatars and replaced them with a default stock set. But their admin was able to rebuild that.

[Janet H]

v 3.8 is cool and does offer a lot of exciting new features. Our site will be upgraded.. but it was only declared stable on Jan 9, 2009. We'll get there, but wanted to wait until as many kinks as possible were ironed out (at someone else's site)