Hello all, hope you are doing well out there in the world. We’re interested in revamping this BBS to add features and improve everyone’s ability to use it as a place to discuss things. Can you give me your feedback on what BBS software you think would be good? I am inclined towards the newest version of UBB but I’d like to hear your thoughts.
Anything popular also tends to be easily-hacked, which can be a problem - there are a lot of jerks out there who will attempt to hack any bb just because they can.
The only thing this board lacks in my opinion is the ability to save your last-read POST so that you can click on a topic and jump to the first new post (or even just tell by looking at the front page whether or not a topic has new posts in it since the last time you were here - Sometimes I remember the timestamp, sometimes I don’t.)
Chris Beveridge who runs the Anime on DVD forum recently posted this announcement.
quote:I’m more familiar with UBB and not sure what benefits fusionbb offers, but it might be worth a look.
As some folks may know, UBBThreads is a dead end product. The company behind it, Infopop, has changed their name to Groupee and is planning to launch sometime this year a new forum. This is good in that they’re doing a from the ground up rebuild of what’s turned into bloated code over the years. On the downside, they’re not incorporating a lot of things that people have been asking for with threads for a few years now.Several folks who worked with Threads over the years and created a lot of hacks and mods for it went off and created their own product which will be debuting in its 1.0 version in August. We’ve been reading and watching it for a few months and checking out the development and support and are likely to do a lot of testing of it when it’s live and eventually switching to it.
http://www.fusionbb.com/forum/portal/index.php
[This message has been edited by perigee (edited 09-09-2005).]
I’ve complained about this BBS’ message board script before. My main problems with it are:
-messages posted by you are marked as new at the board’s index
-no ability to tell which message in a topic is new or old
phpBB is the popular script that gets hacked. It’s also very generic. Ugh.
The name “UBBThreads” sounds like a joke to me, since the format of boards created with it are “non-threaded”.
I prefer real threaded boards. It’s the next logical step for message boards, but people stay with non-threaded. Bah.
This is why I prefer RPGBoard. Sadly, it’s discontinued. However, the latest version is still available, and the script is very stable.
My second choice would be VBulletin. It’s non-threaded, but out of the non-threaded ones, it seems to be the most decent one… except that there’s no feature to see which post in a thread is new. I’ll see if there isn’t anything else one of these days.
quote:
Originally posted by Benoit:
My second choice would be VBulletin. It's non-threaded, but out of the non-threaded ones, it seems to be the most decent one... except that there's no feature to see which post in a thread is new. [img]http://princess.cybrmall.net/ubb/frown.gif[/img] I'll see if there isn't anything else one of these days.
I visit a site that uses vBulletin, and I think it's got several nifty features, like who's-online, topic summary under the title, etc.
As for the new posts in a thread, FuseTalk does that and it's another pretty good package.
I'm not sure the price/difficulty of setup of either one of these forum systems, in fact I've never set up anything like this myself before.
Yeah new forum software would be cool but it’s not a deal breaker for me posting here. Although I haven’t been here as often lately but that’s because work is keeping me busy
That wouldn’t help if you visit again on the same day. It would also require always looking at the “posted” part, which is annoying.
Well, the 3 most common features that I like are:
1: Avatars. They don’t server any real purpose, but they do let us be creative, or try to, and let us have something to be thought of as other than just a name.
2: Private Messaging System. That way, we could flip notes from one person to another. Generally a handy tool, if we want to talk to someone without having to reveal too much contact info.
3: We need Ninjas and Pirates here. There can never be too many Ninjas and Pirates dueling it out. Or even better yet, Ninja Pirates. Yeah, that’s it.
Ninja Wako are always good.
Seriously the only real problem i have the the lack of ability to have threaded quotes.
Another vBulletin fan, most of the boards I visit seem to use it.
Avatars shoud be fine.
PS Thanks Peter for the patch. I really appreciated it.
[This message has been edited by Italicus (edited 09-24-2005).]
I agree with Benoit about the features that would help improve this board the most.
I’ve been reading the Applegeeks forums lately, and they use an incredibly good BBS. I love theirs. It’s powered by SMF and it’s just incredibly easy to use and navigate through yet it just does so much other stuff, and Hawk, the website creator says that it was incredibly easy to setup and maintain as well.
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精神 の 神
I’ll also vote for avatars. Private messages, and a general anime/manga forum would be nice.
I would like to add to what I wrote about vBulletin. I recently learned it DOES highlight new posts, and also allows you to jump to first unread if you want. It also supports private messaging.
If PP switched to any other BBS S/W, my vote would definitely be vBulletin, even more so than when I wrote my original reply.
I’d like sig’s too and an option for text only for our friend (and others like him) here.
something that allows private messages/go back to old post instead of scrolling down so many pages
i dont want people emailing me i dont know. i’d rather just have it contained to this board
I’m mostly ignorant about the finer technical points of BBSes - how easily hacked and the like - I only know what they look like. I tend to like sites that use the Infopop software, IOW, every time I see a forum whose design I find appealing, when I look at the bottom it’s usually Infopop.
A good example - http://www.tombraiderforums.com - is slick and looked great but they recently changed it to some bland colors. That one has an absolutely huge library of available avatars you can pick from, I mean hundreds of them - also the ability to make your own for those who know how (I don’t.) Avatars are a good thing, especially if there are enough of them for people to get unique ones without having to learn how to make their own.
There are a few others I’ve seen, I think all using vbulletin from Jelsoft, that look good and are configurable to a given theme (I suppose they all are to one degree or another.) My faves of these are guitar-oriented:
http://guitar.zentao.com/forum/
http://www.musicianforums.com/forums/
http://www.parkerguitars.com/forum/
As for things I don’t like:
- Forums you can’t browse without first registering and/or logging in, like http://www.mahoganyrush.com/phpBB/index.php - it discourages people from even having a look, which means they’re just going to surf away from the site. Generally inhospitable and unless there’s some security advantage to be had, unnecessary.
- Also forums that automatically change your mouse pointer into some cheesy, theme-oriented icon is far more annoying than cool. Mouse “trailers” can be a plus though.
I’d recommend just sticking with Infopop but getting a manga/anime/bishoujo-themed redesign from top to bottom using the same framework. This one works fine for me but is a little bland in its current appearance.
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“In the absence of evidence to the contrary, always assume you have the upper hand.” - Ronnie Montrose
I get no spam. I’d like to keep it that way.