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Anonymous
19-01-2003, 02:51 PM
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 (http://www.azbusas.com/forum) 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.

Peter Poelman
19-01-2003, 04:27 PM
Problem fixed... I hope...

Please use this topic if there are any problems with the new forum.

Alex: I've slashed a lot of unnecessary things out of the regular phpBB layout. I hope it'll display good on PDA's, but must admit I haven't done any testing myself: too busy doing the actual conversion. We needed to switch to something else, that much was clear...

adesalis
20-01-2003, 08:38 AM
Hi there,

Have just checked the new forum s/w out on my xda, it works fine and the login to see unread messages will be much better.

The only slight problem is the width of this column (the one you're reading now). It is about seven characters too wide (so you keep having to scroll left and right to read the replies).

Apart from that, all fine. It definitely looks and feels better than the old.

rgds,
Alex.

Peter Poelman
20-01-2003, 08:30 PM
Alex: I created a few new templates which are only used when the "Windows CE" appears in the user agent string sent by the browser. I cut some (but not all) of the graphics to make it load faster, and fixed the column width thing.

Forum is now very useable on the XDA...

adesalis
21-01-2003, 07:26 AM
You are a top man! Sending this from my xda - everything is fine.

Thanks very much,
Alex.