A controversial topic.

[staticgerbil]

As most people I have an ever decreasing amount of spare time. 

Over the last few days I've been trying to think of ways I could try to help generate more traffic for the forum without committing too much of my "spare" time, which means finding something that I can do which I have some prior knowledge / tools for.

The best I've come up with so far is putting together a nice cross platform project that will build for win / mac / linux / iOS that people here can use to develop whatever they like and we could release in the App Store.

I'm not sure if anyone would be interested in doing that or if we could get enough exposure there to make a difference but people do love free apps and maybe some 3D art would be interesting, especially demos that might be able to sync to the users own music on their iPod like a fancy visualizer?

As soon as my Android phone has been replaced I intend to get the NDK all setup so I could support that too in the near future.

[Shockwave]

Zeb, I think it's just the latest version.. The one here is an older release candidate and it's difficult to upgrade this now because of all the tweaks I've given it.  For all the work, it might just be easier to migrate to a different forum.

Xetic, a friend has given me access to his Vbulletin board so that I can take a look under the hood   It looks cool!  Probably too much cash for me though.

[Jim]

->SG - I've sworn to do some Android dev this year, and the first thing I might attempt is to port my LOMEDUX liquid demo.  I'm not sure I will produce anything sharable or usable but I will happily share anything I learn.

->Shockwave - perhaps we just update to the latest, losing all the mods and hope that most of those bugs have been fixed?

Unfortunately the SMF sourcecode is an ill thought out jumble of horror PHP code so it is never going to be any good or even vaguely secure.  vBulletin is a lot expensive though, and getting stuck on a legacy version of that would be just as bad as being stuck on a beta version of SMF.

Jim

[zawran]

I do not really know much about forum software, but would either of these two be worth considering:

http://drupal.org/
http://www.joomla.org/

[Zeb]

Drupal and Joomla are both CMS - Content Management System.

Either way you'd still need to add a forum and some CMS apps have their own forums built in. In this case it's either put up with whatever forumsoftware they've adapted (phpNuke uses phpBB) or add some other forum and modify the code so logins work across both.

[Xetick]

Shockwave and the rest, I'm not sure if I'm going to make your day or destroy your now carefully laid plans for the forum but here is a thought.

As I have mentioned before I had a vbulletin forum on my site. However I removed it when I moved over to a windows server and rebuilt the whole site in C# .Net MVC 3.
Since vbulletin is php and my strength is c++ & c# it seemed like the way to go.
I though about if I where going to use vbulletin on my new site in the future but figured that I most likely wont use it for anything. Since if I need a forum on my own site I rather just build a simple forum from scratch in C#.
This of course means that I now still have a active vbulletin 4.x suite (includes the CMS also) license sitting around doing nothing.

So here is the idea. I'm willing to transfer this vbulletin license over to you if you want to convert DBF over to it. I checked vbulletin site and from my understanding so should it be possible to transfer the license. It just needs to be approved by them first.

Since they changed the licensing it should be safe if dbf ran vbulletin because we should at least get new security patches for the 4.x branch as long as they release them. That is, there is no yearly support fee to pay to get these updates.

[Shockwave]

Honestly Xetick, you haven't ruined any carefully laid plans at all.

I'm still trying to make up my mind what to do, and all I have decided so far is;

1: Ask some of the core people here if they would be moderators.
2: Archive a lot of the inactive boards and simplify them.
3: Install a new anti-spam registration process (CK is working on this).
3: Make a new front-end.
4: Possibly convert to new software.

Vbulletin is really nice and that's a very generous offer you've made there we would be foolish not to consider it at least (even though the thought of moving the database over makes me scared!).

I've been promising myself to get stuck into this for the last two weeks and every time I've meant to do it I have been distracted.

This weekend!

And I may take you up on your kind offer for the Vbulletin license, especially if I can duplicate the forum with vbulletin on my box at home.


Cheers

K+

[Shockwave]

And no prizes for pointing out that I can't count to 5..

[combatking0]

I'll see if my anti-spam registration system also works for Vbulletin if we go for the switch-over.

It shouldn't be too difficult if it uses PHP.

[Shockwave]

I have begun to move the boards around and impliment some changes.

It may take a little bit of getting used to but please bear with me, I think we'll end up with something better at the end of it.

[combatking0]

It's starting to look tidier already.

I'm suprised by the movement of the Flash/Javascript boards into the archive, but this forum has to focus on demo coding languages, so I guess those types of things could be discussed in General Coding from now on?

I'm not asking to reverse that particular descision - I can understand that they're interpreted languages rather than compiled languages, and as such they're not suited to fast demos.

[Shockwave]

There is some really cool browser based demo stuff out there but the board was not busy enough and too generalized to stay on It's own sorry I would restore it if there was a surge in interest, but ideally I want to avoid having lots of child boards.. simple is. Better..