Post by Cleophie on May 31, 2008 15:15:43 GMT -5
This is something we've thought about before, I got bored and decided to throw something together for you all to take a look at: here.
User accounts to play with:
Good stuff to consider:
Bad stuff to consider:
Thoughts? Suggestions? Concerns?
User accounts to play with:
- no username/anonymous - Read-only access to general forums, this is what you get when you aren't logged in at all.
- username guest, password rustybuckets - Generic registered user, can post in general forums.
- username member, password rustybuckets - RB member, has access to the member forums and can post topics in general and member.
- username sack, password rustybuckets - RB sackholder, has access to all forums as well as moderating tools.
Good stuff to consider:
- phpBB has much better moderation tools, it's much easier to do post-run bidding cleanup.
- phpBB has finer-grained access control, we can remove the ability to edit posts on a forum-by-forum basis, as well as by user group.
- It looks nicer. I'll admit that the current theme is just something I hacked together to look like the EQDKP theme, there's still some rough edges that I can fix, but I don't think it looks bad for a 1-hour job. The major issue left is to fix some text colors.
- No ads.
- We have total control, both of the server/hosting and forums.
- We can have a link to the DKP right on the main forum page, so people don't have to have two bookmarks.
- It's my opinion that the UI in general is much nicer. In particular, the recent posts page doesn't "flood out" after 10 posts, which really makes it harder to miss topics with new posts.
Bad stuff to consider:
- ProBoards has no post migration or exporting. If we move to any other board system (including mine), we'll have to repost the important stuff, which isn't a problem, but we'll lose old discussion stuff. It's worth noting that this is a one-time thing; phpBB allows exporting and most other board software has some kind of importing or migration path.
- It's hosting I'm paying for, so the forums would rely on me continuing to pay for hosting and maintain them. I don't really have a problem with this, and the files and databases are completely transferrable if someone else with the requisite skills wanted to take over.
- I don't have a calendar set up at the moment. I could very easily set up WebCalendar, or just about any other freely-available calendaring program. Any of them are at least comparable to ProBoards' calendar, and WebCalendar allows for pretty good multi-user access.
Edit: Installed WebCalendar, link is on the main page. You can log in as test/rustybuckets and play with adding events, it's about the same as the calendar here. - People would have to reregister. I don't think this is a huge issue if done over time rather than all at once. It's not too hard to either confirm with people in-game before/after runs or match registration IPs to make sure that people aren't impersonating others.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Concerns?