Its hard to even respond to a message like this - you obviously know nothing about the "setup" we had before nor the "setup" we have now. We were running an old, out of date version of vBulletin (among other things) and the upgrade was absolutely necessary to ensure the security of the site and its members. There was a lot that was "broke" and a lot that is now fixed.
As far as security goes, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't patches correcting security problems come out for older versions of vBulletin? I too run a forum, albeit a phpBB one, and one that is an order of magnitude smaller than Bluelight, and honestly it's kind of the dead these days, but hey, I'm not exactly entirely ignorant of such matters. Perhaps an explanation of what, exactly, has been improved might make this bitter pill a bit easier to swallow on the part of your users? The announcement of "Welcome to the new Bluelight" doesn't have much substance to it with regard to what benefits are actually afforded to the users other than a few mostly cosmetic changes. If there are serious security issues that are addressable only by the upgrade, then so be it; it's a necessary thing, but if not, then why is it necessary? Who really benefits? Was this honestly the best use of the valuable time of the engineering staff--who's work I'm not knocking, but who's aesthetic preferences I can't deny that I take serious issue with.
Survived Abortion said:
You've got it wrong though I believe, things should actually be catered to people with the least power under their hood. It's actually a case of "not everone has a core Sandy Bridge with 4GB of DDR3 2113mhz RAM and an SSD hard drive". I don't believe people should be left in the dust because they are working on netbooks and other smaller devices, especially with a forum such as this where accessibility is key.
^this...
Furthermore, this isn't just a matter of not digging the color scheme; not everyone is working with a top of the line machine or a great deal of bandwidth. And one of the things that I always really liked about the site was the clean and elegant interface, a notable contrast to a number of sites in our genre, and now it's gone, although at least we haven't gone the way of garish colors and black background. Of course, the most important thing is the content, and not the aesthetics; but honestly, it's important, especially if now it becomes an issue of the forum being difficult to use for some.
Frankly the new look gives me a headache, it is distracting, and makes it more difficult for me to read the discussion that is going on. It is just way too busy, which leads it to be harder to navigate, which detracts from the ability of people to interact with the forum in a natural way, which is the core of having a successful community.
Is this all petty? Maybe. I still have love for the admins here, but really, I think the change, unless totally mandated by security needs or something of the like, was a bad one, and I think "New Coke" is a succinct and accurate comparison.