The new forum is up

 From:  Michael Gibson
2.6 In reply to 2.4 
Hi NightCabbage,

> How did you find it, and what made you give it a shot?

Well, I found it just by happening to see this review of it on ExtremeTech.com.

The main thing that made me give it a shot was the review mentioned it had a layout with a topic list on the left and a reading pane on the right, which I greatly prefer. It is much more common for forum systems to have the topic list and content each on separate single pages which requires navigating back to the topic list all the time.

After checking it out, I found it had some other stuff that I considered to be very basic essential things but were also strangely missing in a lot of other forums, like keeping track of what messages a logged-in (non-guest) user had read, so you can easily see only unread messages within a thread rather than having to scroll past the same already read messages over and over again.

Also another thing that is odd in other forums is that searching seems to often return a list of just the threads that contain that phrase rather than a list of individual posts. Then if the thread is long you have to try and crawl through it and search each page to find what you are looking for.

So I decided to stick with it since it had a lot of these kinds of basic things handled well.

I spent about 2 weeks or so customizing it, tweaking a variety of things like simplifying the post content editing page, making the edit field for it larger, slicing out some stuff like emoticon stuff, adding in an "Insert images inline" mechanism to the attachments dialog, tweaking the graphics, and some other stuff.


I'm really glad that I found it.


- Michael