Forum changes coming Topic is solved

[matthew1]

It's called Thanks for Posts (TfP) and it's an extension.

If you’re interested in the problem, I outlined it here https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... pic/222566 after narrowing it down.

I’m getting closer to getting the TfP functionality back.

[matthew1]

Ok, whew. These are back:

• Thanks for Post
• National Flags
• Similar Topics

Complaining and whining:

MAN ALIVE phpBB is difficult. It's like working on a 2020 XC90 T8 that's 20 years old, has 400k miles, ten Magneti-Marelli ETMs, a salvage-flood title, while it's running. phpBB is a mess. This is not a surprise, I've been put off by how it works since I started using Wordpress (WP is not a forum but a CMS) to run MVS's non-forum pages around 2006. WP opened my eyes to a modern, simple open source framework.

I've been low-key scouting for a phpBB replacement for us for years. I think Vanilla is it, not because it has a bright future, but because it has a brighter future vs. phpBB and any of the other dozen or so forum packages available. Follow my exploration push into Vanilla here.

I've started toying with it. I'm in the middle of converting my VW Alltrack's phpBB forum to Vanilla. It has somewhere around 500 posts, so 1/1000th what we have at MVS.

Porting over to Vanilla is months away, if at all. I'll learn a lot from the Alltrack forum conversion and be able to estimate the job better.

Why can't we just keep phpBB?

Well, we could. There's nothing hard-stopping that. It's just old and hell to work on, and these hairy, painful updates will be necessary every year or two to keep the core updated to keep hacking at bay.

Improving it is... difficult.

Maintenance and work on phpBB may/will end one day. It's on life support, and has been for 5 or 10 years.

So then... what?

I'll keep everyone in the loop, if/when a move to Vanilla is on the way, and I'll post about the Alltrack forum conversion, which is a test.

[matthew1]

Topic Solved is back

[volvolugnut]

Thanks for bring back TfP!
Having worked for pay with technology for decades, it has always been hard to explain to the nontechnical, that technical changes are harder than they seem. First they would want to know how long would it take to do something and then they would ask for it to be completed sooner! My strategy became 'under promise and over perform'. Sometimes it even worked out.
volvolugnut

[RickHaleParker]

My strategy became 'under promise and over perform'.

You been taking lessons from Montgomery Scott.