[MDA, XDA, 1010 General] Carlos:
This message contains all postings in this thread

dated before January 19th 2003

Subject: How about better forum s/w?

From: Carlos

Date: 07 Jan, 2003 08:02:07

Guys, this forum software is really clumsy and feature-less.

I'd like to see participation on this board go way up and share

more hacking/tweaks about the XDA, but this isn't conducive to

having that happen.

I don't know what your server situation is, but I'm willing to

put up phpBB on my server at no cost to anyone to host this.

Say the word, and I'll have it running in a few hours or less.

I'm sure you know that phpBB is feature-rich, clean,

user-friendly, and reliable. My server has good connectivity

and is nicely under-loaded. You can see a couple other boards I

host at

http://www.azbusas.com/forum[/

url] and

[url=http://www.cbr1100xx.org/forum]http://www.cbr1100xx.org/for

um if you like.

Drop me a line at misc@speedextreme.com if you want to discuss.

Subject: crummy forum software

From: XDA developers

Date: 07 Jan, 2003 14:09:33

Yes, you're abolutely right: the software behind this forum

sucks. Bigtime.

Thank you for your kind offer of hosting the forum, but we have

a nice-enough unix server with PHP, and we'd like to keep things

under our own control for now.

We've been meaning to get around to looking for nicer software,

but we've been busy doing other things. (You'll see...) phpBB

looks very nice indeed. I would really like to import the

current threads into phpBB. How hard is that? (Given that the

format they are currently in is both easy and understood.)

Another thing: we sort of dislike forums where users have to

identify themselves. Nothing religious, we just feel it's easier

if people can talk without leaving traces all over the place.

Does phpBB allow such a mode of operation? We can always hit

delete if people abuse that privilege...

Subject: Understand

From: Carlos

Date: 13 Jan, 2003 01:17:40

Understand all your concerns. phpBB does allow people to remain

anonymous if you choose (under admin control) or to register.

Personally I'd rather register and always be identified. It's

not like it's going to require government-issued ID and a

fingerprint... You can select the level of control you like.

As far as importing, I don't know if there's a clean way to do

it. What I've done in the past when I've moved boards is to

simply copy/paste an entire thread into one post on the new one.

I understand your time limitations. I volunteer to set up the

board to your specifications and help get it all started. You

can then remove me as an admin and change the main password if

you like. All I would need is full FTP access to a directory

(suggest /forum). Also, the board requires MySQL to be running

and have a DB created ahead of time, it will then create it's

own tables, so of course I'd need that permission in the SQL

server temporarily.

Subject: Forum s/w is good on a PDA

From: Alex

Date: 14 Jan, 2003 10:41:57

I understand that this forum software isn't the most beautiful

looking, but it does load very quickly when you're surfing on a

PDA. Comparing this to other sites, I have to say that this is

preferable and seems to fit better on a PDA screen. I'd rather

be getting decent content than using up my monthly data

allowance on downloading icons, etc.

just my two cents...

rgds,

Alex.