New forum software - check it out ...

I am toying with the idea of moving this forum over to different forum software, namely phpBB2, which is Open Source developed by a gang of enthusiastic developers at:


http://www.phpbb.com/


I have converted over the existing forum (ie. this one) from a backup about a week old. If you want to take a quick look, go here:


http://www.gammon.com.au/phpBB2/


Note that since we have not yet officially moved to the new software, almost every category is locked so you can only view, not post. However there is a test section set up so you can experiment with making posts. Any postings made here will not be saved when (if) the forum goes live.

You will be able (should be able) to log in with your existing forum name and password.

---

Reasons for changing

Why change? Ah yes, that is the question. If you are used to the current forum I would be interested to hear whether you think the new one is an improvement or not, and if not, for what reason.

• More modern, "cleaner" look.
  
• Support for different styles. The phpBB forums can be customised with different templates, so that the same basic information can appear in different ways. So far I have installed only two styles, the subSilver style (the default) and one called "myApple", which has a look and feel of the Macintosh. Try changing to that (click on your profile to do it) and see what you think.
  
• Support for different languages. Although the bulk of the posts are in English, you can customise your profile to present the forum instructions (links etc.) in various languages. So far, I have installed:
  
  
  • English
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Finnish
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Indonesian
  • Hebrew
  • Italian
  • Spanish
  • Dutch
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Swedish
  • Ukranian
  
  
  Other languages can be added on request, if they are on this page:
  
  
http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php

  
  I have attempted to auto-detect the language for each existing user based on their reported country of origin. If course, if you haven't listed a country you will default to English. You can change that with your profile. In cases where I wasn't sure (eg. countries with multiple languages) I have left it at English.
  
• Improved searching. You can search for words, recent posts, posts by a certain author, and various other things.
  
• Designed for large forums. As this forum gets larger some things, like the list of users, is getting a bit unwieldy.
  
• Private messaging. Using the forum you can send each other private messages. This does not use email at all, so you can communicate with other forum members without having to disclose your email address (or even have one). The private messages are effectively hidden posts, that only the people concerned see.
  
• Groups. We can set up groups of users (eg. MUSHclient users).
  
• Closed sections. By using groups, we can set up parts of the forum that can only be posted to (or seen) by members of certain groups.
  
• Improved forum codes. The phpBB system uses very similar forum codes to this existing forum (eg. bold, underline, code tags are all the same) however it extends them with things like font size, font colour, hyperlinks, and image links. Also, they seem to have a better algorithm for the [code] tag, where sub-tags (like [i] inside code) do not cause the code to appear in italics. Also, in the message composing window, by using Javascript, you can just highlight a block of text and click (say) the bold button to make it all bold, without having to type anything.
  
• Improved presentation. Things like code blocks are more attractively presented, with a shaded background and box around them. Similarly for quoting things other people have said.
  
• Emoticons. I'm not sure I like these, but you can use small graphic images to show smiling faces etc. inside your posts.
  
• Previews. When making a complicated post you can preview how it will look before committing it to the forum.
  
• Extendible - the phpBB site has hundreds of mods (modifications) that can be applied to improve the experience. So far I have applied virtually none of them, but things available are stuff like lists of recent posts, appearance changes, recent news, and so on. Visit their site to see some of the things that can be done.
  
• Announcements and sticky topics. Topics that come up frequently can be made "sticky" so they always appear at the top of the list (eg. frequent MUSHclient questions), thus saving us answering the same questions all the time, hopefully.
  
• Same basic structure. The phpBB forum has a very similar overall structure to this one:
  
  
  • Major sections (eg. MUSHclient)
    
  • Topics within a section (they call them forums) - eg. MUSHclient -> Suggestions
    
  • Threads - eg. MUSHclient -> General -> How do I do X?
    
  • Individual posts and replies.
  
  

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Any problems?

Please, if you are a regular user of this forum, check out the new version and see what you think. It will be slightly out-of-date, as it was done from a backup about a week ago.

There may be occasional problems with the conversion of forum codes, but the bulk should have gone across OK. Check out posts you have made, or refer to frequently, and see if there are problems with them.

If you find a problem please quote its URL, eg.


http://www.gammon.com.au/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4957


The topic numbers are exactly the same as in the current forum, so that topic above in the existing forum is at:


http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbsubject_id=4957


I'm all for PHPBB - in fact it was one of the alternative forums I suggested for BMud a while back if you recall. :-) I've only had but good experiences with it. It has extremely rich access control, moderation, and is one of the most fully featured forums I've ever seen.

(edit)
It also has very powerful and convenient tracking of what you've read and what you haven't. Stores it per forum, which makes it easy to only pay attention to a handful of forums without resetting your recently-read counter every time.

Yes, I remember, and a good idea it was too. :)

So far there is one known bug. Due to a misstyping, ordered lists (ie. the [ol] tag) have not converted properly. This will be fixed for the full release.

Yeah, I'm all for it. I use phpBB myself. I like how you were able to convert these forums/posts to phpBB.

This may be a bug.


Topic was started by someone who didn't post. Maybe they deleted their first post?

I think so. Some people do this:

• Post a question
  
• We all spend time making lengthy replies, to explain how to do something
  
• They then delete the question, so the reply looks silly

I think that person did that a couple of times. In fact I am configuring phpBB to not allow people to delete their own posts, to stop that happening.

Sounds good. I'm all for phpBB. Feels odd with phpBB though, heh. I'm used to your forums.

I'm not really fixated on making the change. It took a couple of days to write the forum conversion, but if most people prefer the way this one works, we can leave well enough alone. I had to make the conversion so you could see how the existing posts would look, otherwise it is kind-of hard to visualise.

On the plus side for the existing forum, is it is pretty uncluttered, and easy enough to use.

The phpBB forums look cute, I'll say that. And the customisation of colours, languages etc. is also cute. However at the end of the day, what people are really visiting for is content, not style (I would say).

Still, since the existing posts will be copied across the content will still be there.

I've gone through a forum change like this once. 'bout 5 years ago a forum I had been on (theme was FFT) went from some old forum system (http://on.starblvd.net/meet) to a highly updated phpBB system with a battle arena and a lot more. There have been so many issues (bugs, spammers, etc) with the new forums, that I would take the old forums back in an instant. I think back to them as the 'good old days'. If we do change forums, I hope this never happens.

Well, I'll tell you a funny thing ...

One of my motivations for change was the belief that my existing forum was using "out of date" techniques, namely hard-coding colours and styles into the pages, whereas everyone knows that these days using cascading style sheets (CSS) is the way to go.

Indeed, phpBB uses those, and templates and a heap more, to separate style from content.

Now, as the more bandwidth I use (or my forum users use to be precise) the more I pay, I thought that switching to a CSS-based forum would make individual posts smaller and thus save bandwith. Using topic 4957 (mentioned earlier here) as an example, on the old forum the page source was 25,083 bytes, but with the new forum it is 46,166 bytes, almost twice as large!

One problem is that the CSS styles themselves take up quite a bit of room, although it might be possible to hive that off to an include file (however I note that the phpBB software doesn't do that, so they must have their reasons).

Still, even then, the source still seems to be filled with fiddly things like:


<td width="150" align="left" valign="top" class="row1"><span class="name">


I thought CSS was supposed to eliminate most of that?

According to the web site stats, the main forum page shower (bbshowpost.php) is currently consuming around 2 Gb of bandwith a month. Doubling that is pretty significant.

Personally I really like the way that the current system works. I have tried running a couple of forums for personal uses, and I like the administration abilities of this one almost as much as ikonboard, but I rather disliked phpbb myself.

I vote for staying with this one.

I too would prefer staying with this (read the last half though).

If for no other reason than everybody else uses phpBB, and Im honestly not too fond of the way its interface is.

When I see a site that uses it, the first thing that comes to my mind is 'oh, another one of these...'
Everyone and their mother (and their 5kr1p7 k1dd13 little brother) uses it.

Apart from that purely opinionated comment...

It would require more clicks to peruse through the new posts.
I cant have one single list with the new threads, instead I have to click the topic, then the thread. And then go back to the beginning and do it again.

If there is a plugin for that bit (Ive seen it on some things a 'posts since your last visit' sort of thing, whether thats phpbb or not, I dont know) then while not thrilled about it, I wouldnt mind it at all.
There are some definate functional improvements (sticky topics would be nice, for instance, as would private messages).
Just turn off the smileys! Im sure you can disable them nick... pleeaaseee. Or else every new user will include eight hundred smileys at the end of their posts (and not having them will indeed save bandwidth).

Edit (now that I reread your post and see the bandwidth thing):
Bandwidth is also a concern (especially if youre sacrificing bandwidth to 'look pretty', since personally I dont think it does). Im sure you could get rid of some of the bloat though. Take out all the fancy shadow stuff, its not functional (well, assuming that would help much), we're used to this forum, so obviously we dont mind things cut and dry, can you add a new skin or whatever that is a light version? (and then not have more graphical versions) Or are they just basically color schemes?

You could also look into ikonboard as another option. It has a "new posts" option, skins, private messages, avatars(whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate), sticky topics, frozen topics, and in my opinion, has the best administrative options as well. Basically everything that phpbb has, but in my opinion, works better.

As to bandwidth, no idea what it uses, might be something to look into though. http://www.ikonboard.com/ . Again, just my personal preference.

my 2 cents..

I honestly like this board a lot more because it has the various topics nicely compact at the top, so when I go to the forum I can click on mushclient, then vbscript easily.. call me lazy =p but I'd have to scroll down for the other one..

But, the way phpBB2 handles [quote] and [code] is really nice and easy to read.

Also, I only skimmed over the test board, but I didn't see any "new posts" feature, which is very nice about this forum.

Is there anyway to combine the benefits of both into one?

there is a new posts flag (the little flag/icon things appear in orange instead of grey/white), you just have to be logged in to view them.

A problem I've had bad experiences with is that once youve viewed a page (a forum, not a thread), they all go away, which does get to be problematic, they get marked as 'read' whether or not you've actually read them, I wonder if that is an option.

From a user perspective, phpBB2 is a nice bit of software that does the job and allows people to tweak things a bit to fit their style.

From an administrative perspective though, I don't care for phpBB2 at all. At least not in the non-beta releases. The permissions system for the forums is lousy and confusing to say the least.

I used Invisionboard for awhile on my forums because of all of the various options it had, even moreso than it's predecessor Ikonboard. However when they decided to regrerss and insist people pay for it, Invisionboard met a quick death and we switched back to Ikonboard.

Ikon has come a long way since we originally used it and I'm quite happy with it now. Has most of the same options Invision had, and also allows all of the same kinds of tweaks. Blows phpBB2 away in pretty much all areas unless you happen to despise Perl for some reason.

Bottom line though, I'd say go with whatever makes you most comfortable as an administrator. Clearly we as users will do just fine with whatever you choose.

Thanks, Samson, for the supportive comments.

Having sung the praises of the good features of phpBB, I'll now talk about what I see as the disadvantages, to put things into perspective a bit.

• The first thing is, as an administrator of the forum, it isn't obvious how to do simple customization like putting links to my downloads and order page at the top of every page. No doubt there is a way, the phpBB home page has it, but it seems strange that straight away I have to delve into the code or FAQs to do something obvious like that.
  
• Similarly, I would like to be able to put a "message of the day" at the head of each page, like I have currently done (about looking at the new forum).
  
• Although it has the same structure, believe me because I have just been doing a conversion program, they seem to not use it fully. For example, we both have four levels, eg.
  
  
MUSHclient -> General -> Multiline trigger
-> (individual posts).

  
  For one thing, their main index page shows two levels (ie. all the subtopics for MUSHclient, Area Editor etc.) which is a bit cluttered, whereas this forum (the Gammon forum) only shows the top level.
  
  For another thing, if I work down to the thread about MultiLine Trigger, namely:
  
  http://www.gammon.com.au/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4943
  
  ... then the heading at the top of the post shows:
  
  
Gammon Software Solutions Forum Index -> General

  
  ... where I would expect it to show:
  
  
Gammon Software Solutions Forum Index -> MUSHclient -> General

  
  It seems to have thrown away what general section you are in (MUSHclient). So, although it is possible to view the MUSHclient-only page, it takes a bit of work to get to it.
  
• There doesn't seem to be a feature that does what I now use all the time - to list all recent posts, with a bar showing which ones you have read and which ones you haven't. By using this I can see at a glance what new posts have been made, without needing email notification. I know phpBB has a "view posts since last visit" link, but if you view out of sequence, then basically that is lost.
  
• As I mentioned earlier, the page size of each page seems to have almost doubled, thus increasing bandwidth usage, and therefore slowing down the time it takes to load each page.
  
• There seems to be a strange requirement, which I have noticed a bit in the past with similar boards, that after making a new post (eg. a reply), you don't immediately see your post, but are taken to an intermediate page "thanks for making that post, click here to view it". I don't know why they need that. On this board you always see your post immediately, there is no need for that intermediate page.
  
• The "bio" field is not there, so it is no longer possible for authors to put in a free-form personal biography, which a few frequent posters have used.
  
• I can't see a feature for a "message of the day" per *section* (eg the MUSHclient section). I use that quite extensively in some sections for putting up links to frequently-required information (eg. how to use gdb). I know they have "sticky" posts and "announcement" posts, but if you use too many of those you have to scroll past them every day to find the first "real" post for that section.
  
• No audit trail. Since various events a while back, where people deleted posts and caused confusion, I added an audit trail to this forum (the Gammon forum). The audit trail basically records every posting, change, deletion, new user, user-name change etc. The idea is that I can go back through that and reconstruct what has happened if (say) a user makes some posts and then deletes them. Without that, if someone puts up an insulting post (for example) and waits few hours and then deletes it, they can always deny they ever did it.
  
• Possibly more secure from hacks in the current system. There may be security flaws in my current system, however they have never been exploited. This is possibly because so few boards use it, that it is a small target. However if someone finds a bug in phpBB then every board that uses it is vulnerable.

So there you are, the pros and cons. Maybe what is needed is small improvements to the current system (if indeed anything is needed).

Any further comments are welcome. :)

Well, at least I got some new ideas from phpBB. Check out the main forum page on *this* forum. I have added a few new lines:

• Days forum active: 1,663
• New users per day: 1.37
• Posts per day: 15.46
• Threads per day: 2.90
• Views per day: 906

These figures will change, of course.

The "views per day" is a bit low for today, as that is an average over about 5 years. As the forum gets more popular it is more like 2,500 per day these days.

Not that this is really important, but maybe you should make it two columns instead of one, seems like a waste of horizontal space as it is right now.
Not only to reduce the height, but also line up views with views per day and so on.

This is to prevent double-posting, when people refresh on a post page and ignore the warning about "this contains post data etc." By bringing them to a temporary page, then moving to another one, if they press refresh there is no longer risk for double-posting. And yes, I get a fair amount of double-posting just like that on the Darkstone forums. :)

It's true that PHPBB doesn't provide the recent posts list, but on the other hand it lets you know up-front which sections have posts you haven't read yet. On the same note, it keeps track of that on a per-forum basis, so if I want to ignore posts in, say, the Triggers section, but pay attention to the SMAUG section, then I can mark everything read in Triggers and not have my 'green line' skip over SMAUG.

On the other hand, these same hacks are likely to be discovered and fixed more rapidly, for precisely the same reasons that the boards are more vulnerable. Has anybody ever heard of a security hole in PHPBB?

I don't like the MotD per section idea, personally. I find it unintuitive - doesn't seem to have its place on a forum, but rather a knowledge base. Your 'message of the day' e.g. 'how to use GDB' could be readily reproduced with sticky posts, which I believe can be configured to be only across a specific set of boards.

I also prefer PHPBB's structure, where I don't have to go searching through sections to see it. Maybe that's because I have a high resolution screen, but it doesn't bother me to have vertical content.

And finally, I think phpbb simply looks nicer. :-) You can turn off frills like avatar images and all the fancy emoticons (which might not be such a bad idea) and come out with a very professional look.

For your views per day, you could probably make it views in the last year, although I don't believe you track that kind of information (which views happened when.) At least it would make for a better average. :)

With regard to the double post issue - this may be true on some boards, but apparently the version of Ikonboard I use now doesn't have this problem when one refreshes the page. I just made a test post to see what would happen if I refreshed immediately after posting, and nothing happened. Ikonboard doesn't impose the "thanks for your post" page in the middle of displaying the thread with your new reply. So in that sense, it's probably better all around.

As far as the personal bio section, I'm inclined to think the "interests" section can also be used for the purpose of writing up a short freeform bio instead. The size limit of this can be decided by the board admins.

You are right that such things as phpBB, Invisionboard, and Ikonboard are all difficult to add per-page headers to, but it is possible and I think I've even seen a forum or two that have done this. I have no idea how to accomplish such things though since web coding isn't my thing.

As far as the audit trail problem, phpBB, Invision, and Ikon will all let you set options to stop people from deleting their own posts, or even editing their own posts if need be. The upside to using phpBB is that if you really want an audit trail mod for it, chances are much better that someone will be able to write one for you.

Anyway, as I said before, I think this should boil down to what you are most comfortable with Nick. Nothing wrong with picking up ideas and incorporating them into your own code here.

I had that problem initially here, but now I simply store a hash of the last post you made, and if you attempt to make that identical post again (eg. by hitting Refresh) it silently discards it. Thus, no double posts.

Hi Ksilyan PHPBB has A LOT of security holes and some of them HUGES, for example all the phpbb <2.0.11 have a very hugue security hole.

From phpbb.com:

phpBB definitely has some great characteristics. I particularly like that you can have user ranks, categories, sticky posts, looks nicer, etc.
If you're expecting less bandwidth, don't. In fact, I don't think the current forum could use any less bandwidth (except if you removed the MUSHclient logo from the starting page and used CSS). phpBB has pictures all over the place, and it WILL take at least double the time the current one takes to load. If you care a lot about bandwidth, you could just customize the current forum to use CSS (and remove the sandy background to solid light gray perhaps :P), but if you don't, I'd go with phpBB too.

If you want something small and light weight, take a look at punBB (punbb.org). It's a very fast forum, no images to suck up bandwidth. The developers have a new version that's in beta which is XHTML 1.0 Strict and semantically correct markup and CSS. Or is you wish, you can use the current release 1.1.5.

I'm waiting for the new 1.2 (XHTML) version to be released and I'm going to move my muds forums from IPB to it. But it's your forums and your decision, thought I would throw in another option for you.

Yeah, thanks for the options.

I tried to do ths CSS thing, which is what made me look at another option in the first place.

I (rather foolishly I suppose) hard-coded the style in heaps of places, even though some is done with subroutines. So, converting all to CSS is a nightmare.

And as I pointed out before, the space you might save with less "color=red" tags gets swallowed up to a large extent with "dev=style4" tags, so the saving isn't all that great. Plus, you have to put the stylesheet at the start as well.

Why can't you just include it as a link? The Darkstone stylesheet isn't included at the top of every page, rather, I simply put in:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../../darkstone.css" type="text/css">
and that brings the whole thing in. CSS is awfully convenient and lets you change huge amounts of design layout with only a few rather straightforward changes.

Yes, the CSS savings are that all the pages use the same template file, and it's ONE declaration for every box or whatever in the page. For example, you need to do <font color="#ff0000" size="+2"><center> etc once instead of every time for every box.

Well, if that is the case, how come phpBB don't do that? They must have their reasons. And, looking at the generated page from them I see stuff like this:


<td class="row2" align="center" valign="middle" height="50"><span class="gensmall">50</span></td>
<td class="row2" align="center" valign="middle" height="50"><span class="gensmall">314</span></td>
<td class="row2" align="center" valign="middle" height="50" nowrap="nowrap"> <span class="gensmall">29 Nov 2004 09:04 pm<br />


Maybe they don't have "<font color="#ff0000" size="+2"><center>" but they have an awful lot of other stuff instead.

I mean, I thought CSS was supposed to stop data being swamped by presentation. But you have to look pretty closely at that example above to see the real data (50, 314, 29 Nov 2004 09:04 pm).

Thats because theyre mixing tables with CSS. CSS is 'supposed' to replace tables in layout.
So, in 'real' CSS, you wouldn't have any of that table stuff, just the class declarations.

If you'd like an example... http://rbvband.com is all done with CSS (yeah yeah, shameless plug, it's not related to MC at all, just an example of pure CSS). You'll notice that there's nothing but data (well, basically). That's how CSS is 'supposed' to be used; not in conjunction with tables.

For Flannel...

I doubt this is your intent but when I checked out your site I noticed a small error in layout when viewed in Firefox.

www.minenotyours.com/images/problem.jpg

The first thing I saw there was a message box - "Do you want to install Flash?". I always click "No" on principle, my PC is cluttered enough as it is, so the initial web page didn't look very exciting.

However, moving past that, yes I see what you mean. The HTML source looks fairly clean.

Yeah, flash intro, nothing to see there.

And Firefox doesn't impliment CSS correctly (or completely, if you will), that's what the problems are. Of course, IE has its own quirks. I am aware of the problem, thanks though.

There are workarounds (so when/if you do it nick, you can have it cross-browser), but the audience I see is all high school parents and their kids, none of which use firefox. It wasnt worth my effort to code it a couple of ways in the CSS, and keeping the site small makes it a lot more friendly for dialup users (which is also a large portion of the 'intended audience').

Not trying to start a web design war here...

But have you run your page through the W3C Markup Validation Service? http://validator.w3.org/

There is also the CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

It has to do with Firefox not supporting the height attribute.... or something like that. I don't remember exactly, and now I cant seem to find the pages I was referencing.
Or at least, thats what the problem was with some of the other pages (click on 'sections' and youll see that the row of buttons 'eats' the title of the page). As for the text being outside the box, I assume its related.

But yes, my CSS validates. It's just a problem with browsers implimenting things differently. And it is indeed firefox being wrong (not W3 compliant), and not something that IE looks the other way on.

Do you work for Microsoft? :P

No. I'm just sick of people who claim firefox is the saving grace of the internet.
Sure it's nice, and has nice features, but I haven't spontaneously combusted using IE yet.

This is something that firefox, just doesn't do. I don't know why. You'd think something this instrumental to CSS catching on (cross browser compatability/consistency is the largest thing keeping people with tables for layout) would be a priority to firefox developers/users. (Many of which would benefit greatly from CSS being widely adopted.)

Some lack of consistency is expected, but at least get everything to work to a point that it is useable. In my site it doesn't have really devastating consequences, anyone who has any common sense can still figure out what is being said, but this issue really could cause major problems on other sites.

Mind you, IE has its own fair share of problems. And there are many things that neither of them actually do, much of which, would make CSS a whole lot easier.

Hmm, I've changed my decision. I'd rather stay with this forum. It works for what we do. Nick, why not whip up a quick poll system for this? (Have it require forum user, so duplicate votes will not happen). Or just keep discussion here. Either way.

Are polls really that important? For whimsical things, sure, they might be fun. But if youre really trying to get to the bottom of something (new forum software, for instance), would a poll do it justice?
To get a feel for the results, you'd really need to read the discussion.
What happens if you change your mind through the course of discussion? Most polls don't let you change your vote.

Heck, most polls attract uninformed people. They vote on something, then (assuming they post at all) post 'lolol rofl! option 1 r0x0rs!! u n00bs! y did u vote 4 option 2?', so for 'real' issues (not social-lets waste some time-polls) you can't trust the poll.
Usually they have a couple of options, and are missing a large selection of options, many people would prefer to vote 'mu' on most polls, I think. Like if Nick had set up this poll, he'd have an option for keeping this, or changing it (to phpBB), but what about ikonboard (and all those others, whatever they are).

Eh, I guess it's all up to the community/admins as to whether they want polls or not. Regardless of my personal leanings, Nick might want to allow users of his forum software to have polls.

I agree that polls are not terribly useful and they would require some time to implement. If Nick's going to implement new features, I would rather it be:
- CSS for easy layout (or at least color) customization
- per-section or perhaps (if possible, haha) per-post tracking of what one has read or not, so that reading a post doesn't "jump" the green bar up there for things from other sections


Ideally, there would also be such features as the option to choose a flat layout vs. structured layout, but that might take a wee bit of time to implement... :-)

(Maybe I could write it as an extension and give it to Nick since it's something I personally would like but I doubt Nick would want to spend time on it)

All that being said, perhaps we should examine what is nice about PHPBB - that is, what it has that this forum doesn't - and then figure out how much we (i.e. Nick :P) would like to "import" here.

Well, considering that the base database tables are much the same, perhaps improving presentation here is all that is really required, if indeed anything is required.

Rather than trying to fix existing pages, what might be a lot easier would be to simply write from scratch an alternative way of doing (say) the "showposts" page (bbshowpost.php) which you are reading now.

However I am starting to wonder if we are wandering away from the "core business" here. Would spending weeks changing the PHP files so you can have a brown background really be worth the effort?

Is it really a matter of weeks though? :) Personally I think that it'd be nice to be able to customize if not the layout (which is quite harder, yes), at least the color of the pages, and that really shouldn't be too hard to do. Heck, if we decide to stick with this one for BMud, I'll probably do it anyhow if you don't - I could then give you a patch or something that you can choose to include or not in the main forum.

The colours are probably easy enough to do. I may have a look at that shortly.

This has now been done, see customising colours in this forum.

I was one of the first people to use this forum (put your mouse over my name.... my profile id is 6). I've always liked the layout of Gammon's forum script and have in fact used it in many of my own ventures.

I must dissent in that I all-but despise ikonboard. To take from what that other guy said, every script kiddie and his mommy uses it. That, and the interface just annoys me.

I have a similar opinion of PHPBB. The one major thing I've always liked about your forum Nick is that it's not a cluttered mess of topics where you have to search each and every one for new posts. Instead, the topics are used more for archival and categorization purposes, whereas on the front page it's sorted by new posts.

I also have an opinion of CSS, too. Yes, I have an opinion on CSS. I really do have that much time on my hands. Seriously though, I rarely or never use CSS simply because it's too much hassle, for all the reasons you just described. Also, it can be a pain for someone else to debug your page later on if they have to go through CSS includes linked to CSS includes linked to CSS includes.... I personally think it's just a fad. I'll stick with the good-ol fashioned '<font color="blue">'. You'd probably need about twice the code (at least) to do that in CSS. But at least it would be more confusing!....


If you're getting bored with the look of your forum, though, my suggestion would be to just tinker around with it yourself and play with your creativity. You could add different "skins," new administrative functions/options, etc. Probably the thing I'd like most is that group thing you mentioned; whereas not only can certain topics be closed for posting, but also closed for viewing as well. That way, I wouldn't have to create seperate forums for administration and public use, with the former behind a password-protected directory on my webserver.


So yeah, I'd say your best bet is to use what you got and just try to improve on it as you feel is needed.