Forum poll
UPDATE:
I’ve spent most of today working with new volunteers helping to build a forum in phpBB and it’s very close to done. The lead behind it (Jexius) was pushing to launch tonight, but said he had to go to sleep very soon, so I decided to wait since a few features were still missing and I didn’t feel like risking a second botched launch in a row. The forum looks FANTASTIC, and I found a good theme that matches the site well. It looks like all user registration info will still be preserved and it’s possible old posts and comments will transfer over, though it may or may not launch with that feature. If all goes well, the forum will be up sometime tomorrow afternoon / evening.
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Well last night’s attempt at the forums was less than stellar. Before I give it a second try, I thought I should get everyone’s opinion on what they want. My original goal was to migrate all the news posts and comments over to the forums and not make people re-register. That still is an option, though it’s apparent the software being used may have a few more bugs to be worked out.
The software we tried last night is called Simple Press, a forums plugin for Wordpress. It has a boatload of features on it and is actually pretty customizable. On their showcase page , they have multiple examples, some of which look pretty decent, so the potential for it to look good is there. The only wonky thing I noticed with it was that their search engine interface is a little strange, but other than that I think it’s pretty decent software.
The main alternative I’ve been offered help with is phpBB . This seems like a solid forum interface that many people are probably familiar with and I’m sure there’s a lot of support for. However this option means that you may have to re-register on the site and that all the old posts and comments probably won’t be carried over to the forums.
I still do want to phase out the comments system on the main page so that all new commentary is directed at the forums, but beyond that I wanted to see how important re-registering and old posts were to everyone. I’ve put up a poll. I’ll go with whatever the winner is, unless people make really compelling arguments for another in the comments section.
So let me know what you think, I’m still eager to launch the forums and have more involvement on the site all-round.
[poll id=”2”]
