Im not sure if this has been discussed before, but I thought it would be great if the board would be changed to phpBB( http://www.phpbb.com/ ), or maybe wBB( http://www.woltlab.de/ )since this board looks abit archaic, to me at least. Then we could have avatars and signatures, and someone could put a nice scifi type skin for the background. Overall, I think it would make the forum much nicer, and more enjoyable to post at. Take this forum for instance:(uses wBB) http://www.seki.wbbhost4u.net/wbb2/
[ March 09, 2004, 07:33 PM: Message edited by: Ayato ]
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
This isn't a sci fi site, might be part of it. It's more of a folk/fantasy site.
Posted by T_Smith (Member # 3734) on :
Nothing to add here. I just wanted to say "Domo Arigato Mr. Ayato" ever since I've seen your screen name. There, I've said it. And thus it shall be.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
My thoughts are that you don't know much about forum software, since this ones is current (and has been for some time). Avatars are expressly denied, and signatures are turned off. However, these options are available. The forum looks this way because that's the way it is preferred by the owners of this board.
Posted by Ayato (Member # 6307) on :
My bad, I guess a fantasy skin instead of a scifi one. Anyways...
Yeah, I don't know that much about forum software. So, why are avatars turned off? Can this software have new skins added?
[ March 09, 2004, 07:38 PM: Message edited by: Ayato ]
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
In fact, the software that "seki" site uses is older than the version this one does.
And it's butt-ugly.
Posted by Ayato (Member # 6307) on :
Not as but-ugly as this one. Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
folk fantasy, not fantasy. If you are more interested in Mr. Card's sci fi fans, you might try philoticweb.net
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
Actually, I like the look of this forum. It's simple and clean.
Posted by Ela (Member # 1365) on :
I agree, twinky. Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
I find most other internet forums have a glossy or cartoony look that just bugs me. They definitely don't look "cool."
I certainly can't say that I favour function over form explicitly – I'm a Mac user, and I just bought a shiny new Mac in a sexy aluminum case – but I do like things to look clean and uncluttered.
Posted by Ayato (Member # 6307) on :
I don't like signatures much, since they take up too much space, but avatars are nice to have. But if simplicity is what you like, I guess this fits the bill nicely...
Oh well.
Posted by Chris Bridges (Member # 1138) on :
My thoughts are that you don't know much about forum software, since this ones is current (and has been for some time).
Well, truth to tell the software for this forum is a few versions back, if the version number at the bottom is accurate. UBB is up to 6.7.something now, but most of the improvements are on the admin side.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
As quickly as the new revisions come out, Chris, that dates this version to about Spring of last year. That's pretty darn recent. And yeah, as far as the documentation I read before on UBB, the newer versions make administration easier (hence the dot-dot number change).
Posted by UofUlawguy (Member # 5492) on :
I like the format of this forum, but I prefer the format of the Delphi forums. A few of the features that are really helpful include:
1) each post tells you not only who posted it, but to whom it is directed
2) each post tells you exactly which post it is responding to
3) each thread in which you have posted is marked so that you remember it
4) the forum points you to those posts that are directly to you and which you have not yet read
These features would be a tremendous help in this forum, where it can be really hard to follow a conversation because you can't tell who is being addressed (unless the writer goes out of his/her way to tell you), or which previous post is being referred to, and the only way to tell if anyone has written to you is to read all the way through each thread.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Please, no. I like the clean lines at this sites.
Dagonee
Posted by Primal Curve (Member # 3587) on :
The only thing this forum needs is a tweaking of the index.html template. It just needs a few cell paddings/spacings and a bit of CSS to clean up its overall look. Otherwise, it's incredibly solid. I'd have a hard time believing that phpBB or any other open source messageboard could handle this kind of traffic out of the box.
I'm glad this site doesn't have avatars and signatures. On all of the sites I've been to that have them, they're blatantly abused and cause the site to take forever to load. Some people seem to forget that there are people out there who still use dialup.
Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
I've always liked how stripped-down and clean this place has seemed. I liked it when we only had 11 graemlins. To me, the basis of elegance is simplicity.
Having said that, I run my own forum with sigs and titles and avatars. But I have to have something to bring people in, even if it's nothing more than the hope that I'll some day give them a custom title. This forum doesn't need any of that.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
For a lightweight forum, I tend to run YaBB. Minimal setup, fairly full featured, and very nice to style.
As for whether an open source forum could handle this kind of load, I rather suspect you underestimate phpbb. First, the traffic at hatrack river isn't all that bad, even assuming a very frequent rate of refreshes. Say there are 300 people accessing the forum an average of once every two minutes each at peak traffic (likely an over estimate). That's only around 20 database queries a second (mostly trivial, every forum page has 6 to 8 queries on it, typically), maybe spiking as high as 60 very occasionally. The number of writes per second very rarely gets above one, I would bet.
Second, phpbb is a fairly high performance message board. I've known it to, on a single server with a non-optimized mysql setup, handle 250 people without problem (with more features turned on than this board).
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Actually, John, spring of 2003 was when another forum I'm on started up. It uses the version of UBB that was just released at that point -- 6.5, as it happens.
I'm not entirely clear which of the options that we have over there (like a searchable member directory) were available with version 6.3 (and are just turned off here) and which were not. But we do have sigs, avatars, and images.
OTOH, it's a VERY different crowd, and has only a fraction of the number of active threads at a time.
IMO, the Hatrack setup is remarkably good. The only thing I would like is a searchable member list. Oh, and the "show author of last post"/"jump to last post in thread" features.
Posted by Stan the man (Member # 6249) on :
simple is good. The Mayfield forum I am also w/ uses avatars and signatures. it looks very cluttered.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Wow, rivka. That means faster turnaround than is usual for most boards. Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
No avatars or .sig files, please. The presence of a post count stat is already almost too much, if you ask me....
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
It was a bit buggy at first, too. Although I haven't heard of any problems of late (and I'm friends with several of the mods).
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Actually, while I like the avatars and sigs (well, most of 'em) on my other board, I think they would be AWFUL here.
Way too much traffic; and far too many quick-moving threads with replies that are only a line or two long.
Posted by slacker (Member # 2559) on :
I would be happy if they would switch the formatting of the forums over to other styles, or would even give people the option to do so in their profiles.
An example of what I consider to be a nice BB system is found on anandtech (this link is to Off Topic). The basic layout is very clean (or maybe it's just me that doesn't like either the graphcis clutter at the top with links, or the forum listings).
I also like the fact that 1) it's very easy to search for topics; 2) you can change the number of threads per page and responses per page; 3) you can filter threads so they're listed by creation date; and 4) you can subscribe to threads.
There's alot more that I like about their site, but figure that none of it will be taken seriously here.
Posted by Chris Bridges (Member # 1138) on :
I run a UBB board at my site and keep it fairly up to date, mostly for the admin features.
But while I prefer Hatrack without sigs or avatars, I do miss the ability to jump to the latest post, and to be returned to the same place I left when I post or edit.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Interesting, slacker. I like our layout better; but those would be great features to have.
![[Taunt]](graemlins/taunt.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Cry]](graemlins/cry.gif)
Oh well.
![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
Although I haven't heard of any problems of late (and I'm friends with several of the mods).