Later

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Ed Jones) say:
> Signing off this list.
> 
> It's interesting, but way to busy for an email list serve. It should, I 
> suggest, be run via a web forum.

Oh, how I disagree.  Strenuously.  I may as well get the dissenting
viewpoint out there before we have a rush of people shouting for colour and
pictures and sound and emoticons and a bunch of other things we don't need.

I'm familiar with most of the currently available forum software, including
PHPbb, UBB, IkonBoard, vBulletin, Gossammer Threads, and a slew of others,
including some custom in-house solutions at various companies.

All of them suffer from real feature creep to the point of MAJOR overkill.
Emoticons all over the place, navigation hell...  Mostly they're horrid
pits of poorly organised data that are hard to navigate and often lousily
formatted.  Most of them have forms you have to tab 20 times through
optional fields or emoticons just to get TO the textarea in which you
leave your actual message.  They -require- use of the mouse unless you're
exceedingly patient and have a lot of time to kill.

The best I recall was wwwboard, which was really direct and to the
point--it's -only- drawback being that it wasn't database-driven, but
used a flatfile.  I programmed about 1/3 of a better replacement to work
with mysql that was basically powerful but took all the glitz and BS out of
the UI.  Function with decent form.  Aside from a few features like user
profiles, forum unsubscribe, and password resets not being implemented, the
core of it was done as far as a usable forum interface.  The last 2/3 were
to be administrative and billing modules as I was going to go commercial
at one point.  Most of those things I could live without.  But work called
at the time, and I left it alone after a certain point.  

Let's just say the whole reason I started it though was because, without
exception at the time (and to my knowledge, since), all the SQL-backed ones
-suck-.  I can't think of a nicer way to put it.

Of the modern ones out there that are complete, no thanks.  I actually
think there might be a higher loss of efficiency in taking this forum to
a modern web-based medium than I do about taking data entry to GUI--and
pretty much everyone knows my stance on that.  Bleh.  I mean, it's not for
lack of using web forums, either.  I've used more than I care to shake a
stick at just for gaming communities.  Pretty much every engine out there,
I've used.  I can't name one I don't majorly dislike for one reason or
another--only the severity varies.  That's why I started from scratch.  If
you want my idea of what makes a good CLEAN forum interface, try:

     http://communibuilder.fairlite.com

Register and subscribe to the Computer & Video Games->Chomestoru board
and set your preferences to list 1200 days worth (last active use goes
back a bit).  I had 4 sort modes, expand/collapse, and a bunch of other
stuff working--all without being a royal PITA for the user.  (A nice
piece of it is that right down to the style sheets, the entire thing is
database-driven, right down to the ground--that cb.html is a one-line meta
redirect file for easy URL'ing to get to the entry CGI.)  It was also far
faster than most of the boards I've used--probably because it didn't have
to power so much useless crap.  :)  I guarantee that the machine it's been
on since 2003 is no powerhorse, and is actually usually heavily loaded.

You can tell, if you look, that I don't hold much with cluttered
interfaces.  UI design in the modern forum systems has gone to hell--and
back, and then been left to decay on someone's lawn for a few years.

Too bad I never seem to get the time to go back and finish this thing.
What I did, I did in under a month--learning perl -and- mysql as I went,
which should give you an idea of how hard the learning curve isn't, and why
I look at people oddly when they say, "But that's too hard to learn--it'll
take forever!"  I was learning three layers at once--perl, mysql, and CSS2.
Oh, and bringing myself from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4.1.  Four layers.

Anyway...The -only- positive side to such a move to a forum-based system
would be centralised, instant propogation.  I can't recall when anything
was ever -that- critical that email delays were more than an annoyance.
Certainly not worth going to the effort of switching.

Nay, I hope it's left as-is.  If it ain't broke...

mark->