Did many people stay at 7.09?

I am just curious if many people here made a purposeful decision to stay at 7.09 or some version of 7.0.    I just did an upgrade of one of my sites to 7.14.   It doesn't look like a total disaster, but it will result in a loss of functionality - as almost all major Boonex upgrades do.   As always, it looks like it will be significant work to just get back to where I was before - or even a little behind that. 

I have another site that I have in 7.09 - it is not heavily modified, but it has a few.  The site looks pretty good, and has some decent functionality, and I would like to do some community building there.   It seems to me that the major reason for most of the upgrades has been because "it will be provide a better platform for future growth" - but what about right now?   

What do you think the most compelling reason for an upgrade to 7.1X?   If you decided to not do this upgrade may I ask why?  It is because you got "stuck" from too many mods?

Not trolling and not a baited question.  I have been away from this community for a while and I am just trying to sort this out. 

 Faster performance, better spam controls; those are tops for my upgrades.

I came into Dolphin just before the 7.1 release.  I started out on 7.0.9 and had a beta site up with members helping to build the site, telling me what needed to be fixed, what needed to be added and I had incorporated many changes.  When it was announced that 7.1 was going to be release soon, at least before the end of the year, I stopped working on 7.0.9.  I don't like all the changes that are in 7.1; the move to font-awesome graphics without an easy on or off switch just because it helps with mobiles and everyone is dumping PCs (netbooks and laptops as well) for mobiles to surf the net.  The reason I dumped 7.0.9 was because of problems that I could not fix at the time; and of course at the time I knew even less about Dolphin than I do now and I don't know that much now.  7.1 came with better performance and improvements to such things as video.  Plus, it is moving much deeper into HTML5 and CSS3 and those are must haves.  A lot of the bugs with 7.0.9 were fixed (but not the Chat double posting bug which Boonex seems to ignore like the red-headed stepchild) and Boonex has devoted to being more on top of fixing bugs.

One thing is that a lot of things were moved around in the admin; so it takes some time to figure out where the settings are located.

 Because that is a total different project/programmer; albeit he works for BoonEx, but he is still Rayz, the chat has been the same since I have gone back to versions 5, 6 and up...still the worse part of Dolphin, leaving out the forums.

I have never understood this separation; chat and forums from the CMS.

Perhaps D8 will do something better as all of you may have noticed the top menu here has changed, that is what D8 looks like and we are moving closer to that, so 7.1.x will soon be a past topic like .9; we will always be in limbo, I have accepted that, only because I know the software well enough to fix my problems when they happen.

i stayed cause i can not afford my chat not working,, and dont want to go through a total redesign of my sites,, plus i have spam under control my my sites, never seen a need to upgrade.

Yes, that is very true.  However, they are packaged with Dolphin, so they are a part of Dolphin and if they contain buggy code, it should be addressed.  They have addressed some of the forum issues and made changes and improvements.  One forum change is to remove the separate TinyMCE init.

I have been at this so long that I have had a chance to observe the way Boonex operates, and they very much have a "developers mentality".  To a point, that is good, but they never seem to finish what they start - to actually take the ball over the touchdown line.   

The community here has come up with hundreds of mods - some extremely creative and some just common sense, but unlike other open source projects, they almost never seem to make it into the product.  It is as if they have blinders on, or some kind of firewall between their users and the development process.   Remember when they had that "doomsday machine" built into their code?  This was a default setting that would delete accounts after a certain period of time.  You had to know to go there and switch it off and I know lots of people who lost tons of hard work because of that and it must have been heartbreaking.   It was just a simple setting they could have changed, but it was there for at least a half dozen versions.

I could also never understand why they didn't add all the different blocks they have to each page.   People here modified it to do it anyway, but many of us don't want to mess with code if we can avoid it.  Then there is the famous "null" issue in search - did they ever fix that?  If you make a search with two multi-item fields there is no way for one of them to be "blank" - so the search doesn't work.  This worked fine in D6 - as did lots of other stuff that stopped working in D7 - and they promised it repeatedly but never seemed overly concerned that a major function no longer worked.   Even the Boonex site itself seems to get worse with every "upgrade". 

I'm just wondering if the same thing is happening in D7.1.   Yes, I get that they needed a better way to do templates, and a better system for mods, and certainly we need a good system for security and spam control - but from what I have seen so far there this is mostly another loss of functionality with the only major "payback" is that things will be much brighter in the future.  

I hope I am wrong.  I have decided to give D7.1 a shot with one of my sites, but already I am finding all sorts of stuff that no longer works.   I am also glad that some of the "old timers" have hung in here, but the community itself seems to be a shadow of its golden days - as much of a moch pit as that could be at times.  

I will do probably do some actual "community building" on the D7.09 site I have, and will struggle to get back to where I started with my "upgraded" D7.1 site so it is probably too early for me to form an opinion.   I just thought I would broach the subject. 

I stayed on 7.09 because of the expense already spent on my very complicated site... There is simply too much detailed custom work on the site to move it over without loosing stuff I have spent a great deal of cash on.. I really have no intention of yaying out again for customwork or upgrades....

Like many, I had a lot invested in my site 7.0 site. However, I made the move, to 7.1.x and have no regrets. The software is more stable, faster and SPAM is NON Existent... 

I only upgrade when the Mods I have are compatible or the alterations to code are not affected.

A good reason not to invest in too many mods, I suppose.