Advice to PWE about the new forums

hamradio18

Drop this terrible forum, and use SMF . It is free, and easy to use. All you would need to do is change the default theme, and you have yourself a forum. Please, do yourself some good and either move us back to the old forums, or move us to SMF
I have installed SMF, and administer a forum that uses SMF, and it is great. Please, show us that you still care about us and either roll back, or switch to SMF.

therealfluffy

Actually the forum software hasn't changed. It's still vBulletin - albeit version 4 instead of version 3. It's a highly customizable piece of software (both codewise and designwise) and unfortunately PWE/Cryptic has used this possibility to a point where it apparently has become a severe nuisance. There are plenty of threads already discussing what's less good with the design so I won't add another one, but I urge everyone to have a look at vbulletin.com and watch their default design which is very pleasant to work with.

mikewendell

therealfluffy wrote: »

albeit version 4 instead of version 3. It's a highly customizable piece of software (both codewise and designwise) and unfortunately PWE/Cryptic has used this possibility to a point where it apparently has become a severe nuisance. There are plenty of threads already discussing what's less good with the design so I won't add another one, but I urge everyone to have a look at vbulletin.com and watch their default design which is very pleasant to work with.

Actually it;s vBulletin 3.7.1 from looking at the outputted source. I thought I read some where else that it was 4.

And I;ve got to admit that I don;t think highly of vBulletin. I;m one of the folks who got screwed over when they ditched their free version way back when. Had something like 300 installs on our servers at the time that all had to be brought over to another platform.

I don;t recall that SMF does multiple and separate forums on a single installation. That;s the setup that they have here I believe.

eiledon

phpBB is probably the most direct free equivalent of vbulletin. it has most of the same functionality and the same if not better level if customisation.

As for using other software - the whole point of this latest move was to bring STO (and later CO) in line with the other PWE games (let's face it there is no Cryptic as a company anymore - it is a division of PWE) on the same platform. Yes there are issues but this is what companies do - rather than having different platforms to support, where possible they consolidate on a single platform and because the path of least resistance is easiest it they have brought STO in line with the existing PWE offering rather than changing all the other games. Time is money - doing 2 (3 if you count neverwinter) games is better than the 9 or 10 other games.

therealfluffy

mikewendell wrote: »

Actually it;s vBulletin 3.7.1 from looking at the outputted source. I thought I read some where else that it was 4.

Ah, thanks for correcting me. I didn't do my homework and just assumed Cryptic went for the latest supported version while they were at it. It makes sense to stay with version 3 though since Cryptic seem to have a lot of proprietary modifications added to the forum and they would take a considerable amount of time and effort to port to version 4.

eiledon wrote: »

phpBB is probably the most direct free equivalent of vbulletin. it has most of the same functionality and the same if not better level if customisation.

I'm usually a huge advocate for open source software and I agree with this statement but with an important reservation. I won't say most (since I have no statistics to fall back on) but a lot of basic functionality in phpBB is implemented through plugins created by developers outside the core team. Unfortunately these plugins aren't updated frequently enough to match security updates of phpBB itself. That leads to a situation where you have to chose between an unsecure forum with full functionality or a secure forum with some broken functionality. I'll admit it was some time since I last looked into it and the situation might have changed but this was my primary concern back when I had to chose the software for my own forums.

sollvax

Some better advice

add to the list of "bad words" auto blanked

Troll
Trolling
noob
N00b
Elite
Leet
L33t
etc

anyone who routinely calls people any of the above should stop
it just makes people hate you

mikewendell

therealfluffy wrote: »

Ah, thanks for correcting me.

I don;t see it as correcting you. I recall a number of people saying it was v4. Still kind of wondering about that actually...

I was rather surprised actually as 4 was when they started doing all the CMS stuff and addons.

sovereignman

Probably not necessary to go VB4 since they don't need the forum as part of a CMS with all of that social TRIBBLE considering they got CORE.

And apparently they changed the template system which would monkey up all their existing stuff, and that doesn't seem to play into the assimilation across the board idea.

synkr0nized

Having admin'd both vBulletin and phpBB forums, I think vBulletin is better supported and has a lot more options. SMF hasn't been bad, in my experiences with it, but it's not really all that amazing.

Really the "problem" here is PWE's set up of the boards, not the software used.

beezle23

synkr0nized wrote: »

Having admin'd both vBulletin and phpBB forums, I think vBulletin is better supported and has a lot more options. SMF hasn't been bad, in my experiences with it, but it's not really all that amazing.

Really the "problem" here is PWE's set up of the boards, not the software used.

Don't know much about SMF.

VBulletin can truly be awesome . . . once you break out of the "all defaults" mindset and actually use its capabilities. And a handful of the readily available plugins.

At least its not phpBB :P Not that I hate phpBB, it's just in the "you get what you paid for, expect to futz with it a lot" category.