Cyburbia | urban planning community

[Dan Blather]

https://www.cyburbia.org

Cyburbia, online since 1994, is the oldest continuously operating Web site dealing with urban planning and the built environment. It's like the Bob's Burgers of planning Web sites -- a loyal group of users, generally positive reactions from visitors, but little recognition from the planning community at large. In the urban planning world, blogs and news aggregators reign supreme, older practitioners still cling to their listservs, and the Millennials gravitate to Reddit. The site is unmonetized -- no advertising.

The message board has over 770,000 posts, thousands of them old enough to legally buy alcohol in the US. Weekend before last, I made the switch from a processor-hogging, server-crashing vBulletin 4 CMS/forum to XenForo 2.X. Because vBulletin 4 relied on end-of-life versions of PHP and the like, we had to make a lot of behind-the-scenes software upgrades on the server. The conversion was otherwise uneventful, although we lost custom smilies and user avatars -- a small price to pay. I'm still tweaking and fine tuning, and learning my way around the admin control panel, but so far, so good.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Lee]

I think that the archive of content you have is super cool. Not often you stumble upon a forum with information dating back that far. Good job

 

[msbusybee]

Wow, that's amazing to be online since 1994! It's also cool that you've not monetized the site, I think you'd do great if you ever considered it considering the activity on the forum. Good luck!

 

[dojo]

He he, good job on such a tenure. I'd limit width to 1200pixels (it's a setting on the style area). On my wide screen it stretches way too much and it's difficult to read long lines of text. It's still pretty basic as design is concerned, but still a great community. Kudos for it.