(Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers; 1966)
I have been messing about with various forum softwares for about a year.
What I wanted was an easy to design, easy to build, easy to configure, easy to administer solution.
Largely, over the last year, I’ve spent considerable amounts of time working with software that was none of those things.
Worst by far was phpBB, which is so complex that not one single aspect of it could be called user friendly.
And yet, for some bizarre reason, phpBB is the most common forum software – software that so many forum admins spend years (yes, years!) setting it up and staying on top of it.
Anyway.
I set up a dummy domain and threw all of my prototypes up there, and pushed and pulled my ideas into each of them.
This weekend I had to bin that domain. phpBB is a high-value (and oh so easy) target for spammers.
My latest phpBB build was getting (successfully) hit by c. 50 ‘registered’ forum users (who I never actually registered), who just pumped out the usual spam links.
So it’s goodbye to that domain, and hello to another. And also hello to another (hopefully far more usable) forum solution.
Anyway, you can find the prototype on this domain in a sub-dir.
I’m now playing with content and structure.
I’ll get around to visual customisation as soon as I can.