orbitalair, mowcius:
as for moving the data, it is actually pretty simple, thing is ... if you are willing to rearrange 350664 Posts within 49236 Topics from 37469 registered members into the categories of the new forum, I will be more than happy to pass the task over to you guys.
That was obviously a joke. Now seriously, thing is that over the last 5 years this forum has generated a lot of data which is valuable to many, however there is also a lot of the same question asked many many times. We want to have a clean start also bringing the community in acting as moderators to curate the best forum possible.
The information will still be available and you will keep your user name and profile. If there are interesting posts or opened topics you want to keep on working with, you are more than welcome to bring them in. It is our goal to offer a more inclusive system that will also allow for non-english speaking people to have more and better subcategories, etc.
orbitalair:
I know you personally don't care about rebranding the forum to look as the Arduino forum, but there have been others that have asked for the opposite. It is a matter of opinion, as you know.
Sure we could make this on Yabb, but it is a fact, and this has been a complain from people for some time, that Yabb is running on Perl and that makes it very slow for the pace of growth Arduino is experiencing. Just to give you some numbers, our online system registers over 30.000.000 hits per month, with over 600.000 unique IPs, that eats the 8CPUs of our machine pretty fast, so optimizing and moving to a DB based system is crucial.
mowcius:
Regarding the forum system we are moving into, it is a strongly tweaked version of SMF. We made a survey over a group of users and there were no clear preferences for any of the forums under evaluation.
We have implemented our own user profiling system and a menu bar "Google style", that will allow users know where in the site they are, whether they are logged in or not, and whether they have editing rights for a certain page. We have in the pipeline implementing other services, but without making this move, we weren't able of making it the proper way.