Shyzer.com

I recently started the process of overhauling the freebie forums on HIF, which basically took 48 hours of work over the past three days. People have been asking me why it’s such a pain to upgrade a piece of simple software and the same people are ones who ask why I never upgrade Shyzer or other websites of mine. I’ve never really taken the time to explain, so I thought I’d do my best now.

Imagine buying a car from Ford that does 90% of what you want it to do. It takes you from point A to B, it gets good gas milage, and people love it. Well, that’s like installing the basic forums or wordpress, which is the software I use here on Shyzer. I install them, people can post, reply, make friendships, etc. But there’s still a few things you wish the car had. You’d love a GPS navigation guide and a cool stereo system wouldn’t hurt either. But you don’t want to buy Ford’s version of these since there are companies out there who specialize in and make better version of them. So you buy a GPS guide from Company X and a stereo system from Company Y and have them custom fitted and installed in your car. These are the equivalent to forum modifications or wordpress plugins. Basically, they’re made by hobbyist coders and tech enthusiasts worldwide and while they’re usually nice and cool, since it’s a one-man job there’s no quality control or tech support on them. You have to download them, install them, and then just hope they do what they’re supposed to.

Now a few years pass. Your car is doing great, you’ve found some custom mods that are working fine, everybody’s happy. But you notice that Ford’s come out with a newer model of the original car you bought. You’re not sure if you should really upgrade or not, but then you see this awesome new autopilot system that Company Z is selling! Sweet! Just install it in your car and presto - you can let the car drive for you. You mast have it! But wait a minute…aw crap, they don’t make a version compatible with your old car. They only made them for the newer models. Doh! And you start to notice that more and more companies are only making add-ons for the newer cars. This is the allure of upgrading.

But upgrading isn’t that easy. You and you’re members have made thousands of posts and comments. You don’t just want to throw them all away. You want to bring them over with you to the newer upgrade. It’s like wanting to upgrade cars, but still wanting to keep the same seats that you’ve spent years molding to your own physique. And you really love the way the steering wheel grips in your hands and you hate the sound of the newer horn, so you want to bring those along too.

So in this horribly long analogy, instead of just buying a newer model car, Ford sends you all the pieces that have changed and you have to upgrade your car, piece by piece, bit by bit. And once you’ve finally done so, you realize that the old GPS guide you had doesn’t quite fit in the new dashboard anymore. So you need to go out and find a newer model of that. And a newer model of the stereo system. And…

See how much a pain upgrading software can be?

On the freebie forums, I had 14 mods installed - including two custom mods that I paid to have created just for us - and luckily managed to find upgrades for all 14 of them. There are still a ton of tweaks and fine tuning to be done on the forums, but the hard part is thankfully over. The same can be said for that crappy analogy

Anyways, that’s why sometimes you’ll see sites using older versions of software. It’s not because they’re lazy or don’t care about security, it’s because they’re not convinced that everything won’t break after they upgrade! But luckily for all involved, keeping Shyzer up-to-date is quite an easy task.