Virgin Media O2 update on status of UK Community Forum upgrades
Broadband and mobile providers Virgin Media and O2 (VMO2) have today provided a brief update to ISPreview on the status of their popular customer community forums, which have been offline since the start of this year for a major platform upgrade (originally they were also going to be merged but this was later abandoned).
Both operators took their separate community forums offline for new postings in January 2026 (here) and later removed public access to view the content (the original URLs currently just produce error messages). Since then, they’ve been busy working to upgrade both forums from the old Khoros platform and on to a different solution from Sprinklr.
The reality is that upgrading the platform and database of such massive communities is often a nightmare to pull off smoothly. Complex database migrations rarely go without problems and often throw up significant obstacles. This partly explains why VMO2 has never once specified how long the downtime would actually last (i.e. they couldn’t be sure themselves), although we had previously expected O2’s forum to be back online this month.
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On top of that ISPreview has recently noted some conflicting claims about VMO2’s future plans (i.e. some suggestions that Virgin’s forum might not return), which appear to have been partly fuelled by reports that VMO2 were are looking to make c.£600m in cuts to improve the company’s financial position. The recent demise of TalkTalk’s community forum helps to illustrate what can happen when cuts become more aggressive.
We recently put all this to VMO2. A spokesperson today informed us that the upgrades have not been abandoned and “testing is still going well“. The operator added that they “remain on track for both forums to be reintroduced in the near future,” although they’re still not able to give a firm date on when both forums might return. The language is perhaps slightly more confident than the last update in late May 2026, when VMO2 simply said they aimed to “go live as soon as is practically possible.”
The interest in all this stems from the fact that community forums remain an incredibly popular and useful tool for customers of such services to raise their issues and get support, even during periods where the telecoms provider itself might seem to be unresponsive (community members often help each other out). Suffice to say that there is a lot of interest in the return of both forums.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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o2 told forum regulars it would be back by May 2026, but we all knew I think that was a pipe dream..
I have a feeling it will be 2027 before it returns..
IT offshoring remains the classic example of buy cheap and pay twice.
Two ways iof looking at this:
1. They meant May 2027
2. They are waiting long enough to see if anyone asks when its coming back, and when numbers fall to a few, can it forever.
Option 1 if they cant get away with option 2 under the 600M cuts.
Pretty sure the reason VM hasn’t provided a timeline is because A) They don’t care about their customers at all, and B) I assume that they are still trying to work out if they can get away with junking the whole thing and get out of having to pay for the migration.
This is what happens when unqualified people try to do things they are not qualified to do!
There are thousands of highly qualified experts who could be contracted very easily do this job and give you an exact time scale before shutting down anything or having any downtime whatsoever.
Also, you could literally pay a team of cheap overseas labourers to MANUALLY copy and paste every single field from the old database to a new database and it would take 12 months and about £6000-12000. Average yearly salary is about £1000 in some countries.
You could also just hire an expert for about 2-4 weeks and also pay him £6000-12000 and have a time definite and proper job done.
Almost an ENTIRE year for a forum merge! hahaha. sometimes I wonder what planet we’re on. This is 2026. This job could even be done using AI.
And also, another mistake is going from one heavily proprietary, closed source forum system to another heavily proprietary system. Why use companies that make it not easy to leave?????
Forum merges/transitions are much easier when using proper forums like vBulletin, phpBB, xen etc. which have tried and tested means of transitioning between them. Using a forum software from such proprietary koros or sprinkr is just a recipe for disaster and difficultly when trying to switch forums.