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A long time ago, on a Vbulletin forum long gone away... The KSP forum was about to be switched over to IPS4, many changes were announced, and among them, was the announcement that the blog feature would be eliminated. This course of action resulted in the deletion of @HarvesteR's old 'dev blags', these highly valuable blogs became lost to the community (So far as I'm aware, if it turns out they weren't actually deleted, I'm sorry.) Luckily, I downloaded as many of the old blogs as I could, and now, I'll share them with you. https://www.dropbox.com/s/of4cgm5mrkztsuh/KSP Dev Blogs.zip?dl=0 It's quite nostalgic really.

So, it's been a few days since the forums got migrated to the new forum hosting software, IPS. Many of you are displeased, some of you like it, and some of you don't care. However, I'm going to try to put together the best comparison between the two that I can. I consider myself somewhat unbiased, since I have participated in many other forums on different softwares than vBulletin, so I'm not a fanboy. And I've also never been on an IPS forum, which means this is all new to me. So, here goes: NOTE: This comparison isn't just IPS vs. vBulletin. This is a comparison between what we had with vBulletin on the KSP forums and what we have now with IPS on the KSP forums. Firstly, lets compare just the main features. No opinions here, just a direct comparison between the two. Feature: vBulletin IPS WYSIWYG editor. Yes, although buggy. (Backspace would delete all the characters since the last format change) Yes, and not buggy. BBcode in editor. Yes, there was a BBcode only mode, edits and unposted quotes still contained the code. Yes. You can use BBcode in the editor. The only drawback is that once it is posted it is converted into WYSIWYG. (excludes certain codes like tables) Reputation. Yes. Rep power was determined by post count and rep given, maxed at 5 per rep. You couldn't give rep to the same person until repping 5 or so others, and couldn't give out more than 10 per 24 hours. Yes. Rep power is 1, but there are no limits besides you can't replike the same post twice. Notifications upon being quoted or mentioned: No. Yes, and they are configurable and can be turned on or off. Ability to keep up with your friends: Sort of, by becoming friends with someone their posts would pop up in your feed. Yes, you can "follow" users and keep up with them. Thread subscription notifications: Sort of. Sometimes failed to work, especially email notifications. Yes, can be configured. Not sure about email updates yet. Search: Yes, but it was terrible unless you knew exactly which 17 options to choose to find the content you want. Haven't tested, please give your experiences with the search feature. Blogs: Yes. Sort of. You can post "Updates" to your profile, although not in a specified place like a blog. "Who's Online" list Yes, and in nice alphabetical order. Yes, but random, extremely hard to check if someone's online using only this. That's all I can think of for now for the basic feature differences and important points. Now for opinions. Styling: vBulletin: It looked OK, but a bit on the older side. Wide body text, fills up 16:9 aspect ratio. IPS: I kind of like it a bit. Of course, I have the style addon that you can find [url=http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/126808-made-a-user-style-to-increase-forum-contrast-and-available-space/]here, which makes contrast better and widens it to fill screen space. By default there is a lot of space on the sides of the forum, as the entire screen is not used. However the addon I linked works to fix this. Editor: vBulletin: WYSIWYG was a bit broken, upon hitting backspace it would delete all text that was typed since the last format change. BBcode was ok, if a bit time consuming. IPS: WYSIWYG works well as intended, and is easy to use. BBcode is still an option for those who prefer it. Reputation: vBulletin: I liked the old system. You could give up to 5 rep per user post, and there were restrictions in place to prevent rep spamming. IPS: Only one rep point per like slows things down from the old system, and isn't totally offset by the no limits on repping someone. You can go rep every post they're ever made in one day if you've got the time. Just not the same post twice. Thread Pages: vBulletin: default was 10 posts per page. Made it easy to gauge how many posts were in a thread by looking at the page number. It also made it easy to scroll to the top and bottom of the thread, while still allowing a good bit of reading before clicking to the next page. IPS: Default is 25 posts per page. This means less "next page" clicks, but it also means its a workout to scroll to the top or bottom of a thread with over 15 replies. Well, that's all I got off the top of my head. If you've got something else to add, let me know! If I think the same thing, or if it's just blatantly obvious, I will add it. For me, the ultimate conclusion is this: I was skeptical at first, but its growing on me. I miss a few features of the old forum, but I also very much like the features of this new forum. Well? What do you think?