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Updating the web boards?

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Updating the web boards?

Postby Graf » Mon Feb 05, 2007 9:53 pm

While I understand this is probably a low priority given the size of your company I thought I would mention that your message board system is an impairment to the enjoyment of members of the community to your site. This could probably be alleviated by a general upgrade of the software you use to run your boards.

*You can’t pick multiple styles for the board (convenient for people who read from work and don’t want a flashy silver/red screen)
*When you “scale up the size of text” to make it readable (the default font is –tiny-) the quote boxes don’t rescale properly and you need to scroll back and forth to read every sentence
*No printable thread option (mentioned by others I know)
*Very limited set of options in the options menu: No ability to block avatars pictures, etc.

These kinds of things were more generally prevalent on certain boards a few years ago so I assume that an upgrade would probably fix most of your problems.

You have a diverse and active board and what looks like a solid community but I think you’re losing casual readers because of the aggravation of dealing with your message board system. The tiny unreadable font/scrolling issue in particular comes to mind.
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Postby EL » Tue Feb 06, 2007 3:01 pm

I don't frequent many boards and so don't really notice this stuff but lately I have been on the boards at giantitp.com. Thiers are really nice and were recently updated too.
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Postby Black Mamba » Tue Feb 06, 2007 3:24 pm

EL wrote:I don't frequent many boards and so don't really notice this stuff but lately I have been on the boards at giantitp.com. Thiers are really nice and were recently updated too.

I prefer vBulletin myself but it is a different software then the phpBB use here. A lot of companies prefer to use phpBB because it is free - vBulletin is not.
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Postby Graf » Sat Feb 10, 2007 2:30 am

I note that several of the boards I was looking at are, in fact, vBulletin.
I think I'd assumed phpBB was the same as vB because they look similar.

So this is state of the art in the open source/free world?
(text not wrapping properly when resized seems un-state-of-the-art but I know some OSS programs aren't that good)
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Postby Black Mamba » Sat Feb 10, 2007 9:09 am

I do not know what version of phpBB the ATT is using - it could be the current version or it could be one or two updates behind - but yes, phpBB is about the best open-source bulletin board on the market.
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Postby Barnum » Wed Feb 28, 2007 1:43 pm

I do not know what version of phpBB the ATT is using - it could be the current version or it could be one or two updates behind - but yes, phpBB is about the best open-source bulletin board on the market.

I certainly hope they aren’t one or two updates behind. phpBB has long since stopped releasing feature updates for 2.x while they work on v.3. Every update that they have put out over the last few years has been security fixes only. Being a few updates behind could be disastrous.

Also, not only is phpBB free, but it's code is open source and far easier to modify (in my opinion) than vB . . . especially when it comes to templating.
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Postby Roman Virtue » Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:20 pm

Personally, I have no problem with the 'look' of the ATT, the content is far more important to me than look! :wink:
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Postby Black Mamba » Wed Feb 28, 2007 2:38 pm

Barnum wrote:I certainly hope they aren’t one or two updates behind. phpBB has long since stopped releasing feature updates for 2.x while they work on v.3. Every update that they have put out over the last few years has been security fixes only. Being a few updates behind could be disastrous.

Green Ronin did an update to the forum just a couple of weeks ago so I believe it is now as current as can be.
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Postby daniel_ream » Mon Feb 23, 2009 8:57 am

Bump.

According to the code comments and the copyright notice at the bottom of the page, the board is still running phpBB 2.0, which is now several years out of date. According to the phpBB group, upgrades from 2.0 to 3.x are simple and can be done in-place.

I've been seeing a number of performance issues and errors recently that would likely be resolved by an upgrade. I realize GR is going through tight times right now; I would be happy to offer my skills as a sysadmin gratis to help upgrade the boards.
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Postby Barnum » Thu Mar 05, 2009 11:01 am

Not only is 2.x out of date, support for it has stopped completely at the phpBB.com web site . . . and the developers have stopped releasing security patches for version 2.
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