Thinkpads Forum

Maybe it's been explained earlier, but I can't understand why you would want to change the forum software. OK, so maybe the site maintenance is a bit of a pig to manage with the present setup, and if so, then fair enough. But if it's to change the presentation to something more fancy, as has happened to quite a few other forums recently, then I'll be very disappointed - I've yet to see a change which has improved the simplicity, clarity, or ease of use, for the forum users. And I've simply given up on some of them, the Madisound forum in particular.

Hope you're not going the same way ................

We're currently on v2 of phpBB, and we're just upgrading to v3 which has more features and functionality built in both from the members' perspective as well as from ours. If we use the comparable theme in the new one as the default, from your perspective it will be very similar to the current forum.

FWIW, I know how you feel. one of my favorite forums just switched over from phpBB to Drupal. Perhaps it's just their implementation, but... Not a good move at all.

Some of the things that we're looking for with the upgrade are:

• - ability to join duplicate threads instead of locking one of them
  - ability to block empty posts
  - ability to limit # of nested quoting levels
  - ability to cc someone on PMs
  - some new moderator controls that were admin-only
  - better logging and reporting features
  - RSS functionality
  - more posting and editing features
  - some improved search capabilities

nonny wrote:We're currently on v2 of phpBB, and we're just upgrading to v3 which has more features and functionality built in both from the members' perspective as well as from ours. If we use the comparable theme in the new one as the default, from your perspective it will be very similar to the current forum.

FWIW, I know how you feel. one of my favorite forums just switched over from phpBB to Drupal. Perhaps it's just their implementation, but... Not a good move at all.

Thanks for the reply - I hope you're right!

jtt3011 wrote:Thanks for the reply - I hope you're right!

It will definitely be similar. We've already seen one of the partial conversions, so we know how that looks. We've also been playing around with all the new admin/mod controls in a test environment to learn them.

Are the birdies, feathers, and mousie coming back??

Yup, hopefully we'll all be befeathered again later tonight! Well, I won't - I'll have my pink ears back, though!

jtt3011 wrote:Maybe it's been explained earlier, but I can't understand why you would want to change the forum software.

janeL wrote:We're currently on v2 of phpBB, and we're just upgrading to v3 which has more features and functionality built in both from the members' perspective as well as from ours

Also, support for v2 of phpBB officially ended last week, so everyone running a v2 board should seriously consider upgrading to v3 for security reasons if nothing else: Support for phpBB 2.0.x has ended

Phil.

I like it!

If you want to see how an "upgrade" can torpedo a forum, check out the new Dell Community Forums. They went from something like this to "community" software in the hopes of becoming more Myspace-like. There were literally people asking questions about how to post a message. Yikes!