Forum niceties: the wish list!

[michaelsuave]

Well this forum was dead, so I thought I would post in it for no other reason than that it was here, collecting dust.

Just felt the need to point out that doing things such as that for that reason is considered what you call 'Necroposting'.
From Wikipedia:

"Necroposter," is a term used in online/internet discussion boards. It descriptes a person who revives older Internet discussion board threads (approximately older than two months) and adds a post to it, thereby, "bumping," the old thread to the top of the discussion board priority list and subsequently gaining the attention of the other discussion board users. Mostly the new post that revives the thread is not very helpful or interesting. The overall term for this concept is, "thread necromancy."

That being said, you did post something relevant, so I don't think this would apply to you in this case .
A few things that I personally noticed this board not having are a list of predefined avatars and more than one board style; different color/graphic schemes for the various stories from Fel comes to mind. Other things would be more/different smileys, or what I've seen elsewhere, a karma system (user rating through other users), though I personally am not too fond of such. Seen too much abuse of such a system, by people just randomly smiting (negative karma) others just for the heck of it.

Ok, so I bumped ... But I do agree, I would love to see more emoticons. Also, if there was some way that we could support the website? I know that Fel wants the literature to remain free, but I thought we could show our support by helping develop and keep up the websites related to his work. What do you think?
~Michael

[Spec8472]

Ok, so I bumped ... But I do agree, I would love to see more emoticons. Also, if there was some way that we could support the website? I know that Fel wants the literature to remain free, but I thought we could show our support by helping develop and keep up the websites related to his work. What do you think?

There's no need for financial support for the site.
The hosting I provide because I have the ability to... (I got the hosting for other projects, etc... ). The domain is also paid for too.

If you'd like to volunteer for other things, check out this post: http://sennadar.plebian.net/forum/viewt ... =7124#7124

As for emoticons... uhh... which ones? Link to them (i.e to the creators page, or a page which is (legitimately) giving a free licence to them) and I'll load them up.

[Quindo Ma]

*shrug* don't know of any specific sites, aside from the official one. PHPBB has a bunch of different downloads for changing the look, thre are somwhere around 50 smiley packs on that page.

[Spec8472]

*shrug* don't know of any specific sites, aside from the official one. PHPBB has a bunch of different downloads for changing the look, thre are somwhere around 50 smiley packs on that page.

Well, I'm not desperate for any more smilies... so...

[Fiferguy]

*shrug* don't know of any specific sites, aside from the official one. PHPBB has a bunch of different downloads for changing the look, thre are somwhere around 50 smiley packs on that page.

Well, I'm not desperate for any more smilies... so...

Aww, why not? I added some to mine..

[Quindo Ma]

Well, I'm not desperate for any more smilies... so...

Dispite the focus on smileys in the above posts, it was merely an example of possible changes. There are a lot of other graphical changes/options for the phpbb forumsoftware on the official site, and I'm sure quite a few on inofficial ones.

I took a tiny peek through the mods and styles on the official page, and just there you can find hundreds of things. My personal suggestion would be for anyone who wishes to have a certain feature here to look on http://www.phpbb.com under the Styles and Mods sections for anything you wish to have. Most of those things can be fairly easily installed on the board, which is what Spec wants to have, and you might just find what you're looking for there. And if not, *shrug* you can always beg here

[Spec8472]

I took a tiny peek through the mods and styles on the official page, and just there you can find hundreds of things. My personal suggestion would be for anyone who wishes to have a certain feature here to look on http://www.phpbb.com under the Styles and Mods sections for anything you wish to have. Most of those things can be fairly easily installed on the board, which is what Spec wants to have, and you might just find what you're looking for there. And if not, *shrug* you can always beg here

Styles are another issue, and unless someone is willing to go and write a better plugin system for PHPbb (even under PHPbb 3.0, it's still light years from what Wordpress can do) - it's probably not going to happen. (i.e, instead of modifying template code, or various other core bits of functionality, plugins should be self-contained)

Mods, yeah, maybe... put it on the list if you want it.

I don't believe in adding mods for the sake of it - they're mostly not "free" (in terms of performance), so there has to be a good use for it.


I've added some things under my page on the Wiki (initially) to gather feature requests and current issues.

Keep it simple. Discuss here, maintain lists over on the Wiki.


<a href="http://wiki.sennadar.plebian.net/index. ... nnadar.com (Website)</a>

<a href="http://wiki.sennadar.plebian.net/index. ... ">Sennadar Forums</a>

<a href="http://wiki.sennadar.plebian.net/index. ... ">Sennadar Wiki</a>

[Quindo Ma]

Styles are another issue, and unless someone is willing to go and write a better plugin system for PHPbb (even under PHPbb 3.0, it's still light years from what Wordpress can do) - it's probably not going to happen. (i.e, instead of modifying template code, or various other core bits of functionality, plugins should be self-contained)

Mods, yeah, maybe... put it on the list if you want it.

I don't believe in adding mods for the sake of it - they're mostly not "free" (in terms of performance), so there has to be a good use for it.

Server performance aside, there's always the risk of putting in too much good and making it bad. Giving too many options is likely to confuse the average user and make even the best of the crop seem not worth the bother, in the end rendering all the available options useless. Such consideration of course has to be made by the admins, though discussing what is a useful feature and what bloat with the users can have it's benefits

As for the software itself, at this point I must admit that anything I know regarding phpBB is fairly superficial, though that's likely to change soon. I've got a hosting transit coming up on another forum I admin, a forum that is pretty borked and where no one that uses it has any access to the files themselves, because the original admin had no clue and just asked his work colleague set it all up, whom we have no contact to. Even with the admin backend I have no idea what the files themselves are looking like. Hell, can't even see the database

[Spec8472]

Server performance aside, there's always the risk of putting in too much good and making it bad.

Yep, agreed.

Even with the admin backend I have no idea what the files themselves are looking like. Hell, can't even see the database

You can pull a database backup from the PHPbb admin control panel. That's all you need to move the forums.

[Quindo Ma]

You can pull a database backup from the PHPbb admin control panel. That's all you need to move the forums.

I know and I hate that yet it doesn't work.
The problem is that the person who set it up either did something wrong, never bothered to set up that part of the software (if that's even possible), or deliberately broke something to prevent us access to the database. While I do get a download tagged as phpbb_db_backup.sql, that file in actuality holds html code, opened in a browser it's easy to see the error displayed: the auth_access table is missing.

*shrug* The guys in charge are still debating if we're even gonna bother trying to transfer all the posts. Should that be decided, I'll just have to go bug the actual admin of the server