Time for a change

[Sergeant Major]

Ok, I've been putting off making this decision to see if the automatic upgrade to zeta boards would make a big difference, but the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be when the time does come to change. So, I post the question to you all... Would you rather we stick with InvisionFree forums, or move to another type of forums (such as PHPBB)?

Since I am going to change the name over to the GeneralAquaria.net domain, all of the inbound links will have to be changed anyway... so now is the best time to change forums too, if we are going to do that.

I will still point the aquatopiaforum.com domain to a redirect page for the remainder of the registration period (somewhere around 6mo. left), but after that I'm not going to renew that domain.

[bartier]

What difference will it make?

[Sergeant Major]

Well, the biggest differences are that if we leave invisionfree, we will probably have much less spam attacks, as the majority of our spam is comming from spammers who are targeting invision rather than our board specifically.

Second, it would guarantee that we could get an image verification step during the signup, which would mean we could re-automate the signup process making it much faster for new members to sign up.

Other pros would be that we could change anything in te setup and wouldn't be constrained by certain formatting. We wouldn't have to worry about making sure ad removal is up to date and paid for, but we would have to pay for hosting (I don't think that will be any big deal).



Drawbacks could include there not being any guarantee that everything would transfer over properly, and most likely we'll have to start from scratch with the skin (not a big deal, I can take care of that in just a weekend. The biggest drawback would be if the membership info didn't transfer, so we had to start over as far as membership goes... although if we do it right now, there's only a few of us still active right now anyway, so it wouldn't be AS big a deal for us to re-register. So that would just leave the possibility of losing the posts, which I will attempt to mitigate by having invision transfer the board data files.

[Perfectblue]

I think changing to a different forum would be the best option, so I voted yes. I wouldn't mind re-registering if we do switch.

[r33f-boy]

Same here i agree with PB.

[bartier]

Sounds fine to me. I can't wait to try and get this place going again.

[Sergeant Major]

Ok, well I checked out IPB and VBulletin and after finding out how much they cost, I've decided to go with phpBB. I got it installed and I've been working on skinning it for the past 2 days now, and I realize now that it's going to take at LEAST a week or more to skin it.

Also, more bad news, we won't be able to automatically move over the posts... that's a real bummer, but they will only do that for IPB which is quite expensive.

But I still think it will be worth it. I'll leave this one up for a bit after we get the new one going, so we can manually copy over as much as we can.

We're already getting the hits on the website (I love the stats I get, it breaks our hits down by people and bots as well as unique visitors, etc). We just have to start converting those into new members in the forums now, then we can really crank it up.

[Sergeant Major]

you can see the new forum as it's being created over at www.generalaquaria.net

I'd love to have your input as it comes together slowly.

(note, each change is taking me a very long time at the moment, but I'm sure it will get faster as I learn where everything is.)

[Sergeant Major]

By the way, ignore the ads at the top, those are just temporary for the next week or so.

Also, you can now register I think. Let me know if it gives you any difficulties in registering.

[bartier]

www.generalaquaria.net doesn't work for me

[Sergeant Major]

Heh, yeah my mouse picked a bad time to give out on me... I got a new one now so I can go back to fixing that... was trying to add a modification that lets us put in subforums.

[FishyFry]

I voted yes to the poll.

Meanwhile, here are the results from generaquaria.net:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_ELSE in /home/content/g/a/t/gatbunton1/html/index.php on line 368

[Sergeant Major]

It's back up now, I'll take another crack at that subforum mod tonight, and this time I'll back it up before I start so it won't take more than a couple minutes to fix it if I break it again.

I've spent the last couple of days restoring the forums and modifying the new install for some anti-spam measures. I don't think we will have anymore problems with spam bots.

Still might run into a few human spammers, but I doubt we'll run into that many, certainly not enough to have to lock down the validation process again.

You should be able to go ahead and register if you want to, although it will still be another week before I get the structure in place.

[Sergeant Major]

I stand corrected, I found a different subforum mod that was easy as pie, so the forum is up and fully functional as of now. I still have a fair bit of skinning to do, and I need to find the right mod to transfer over aquatokens... which we need to rename I think, any ideas?

Please try to register over at the new forum by the way. I won't be able to tell if all the security mods I did will keep real people out until someone registers. If you have any trouble, please let me know here.

[bartier]

Generaltokens lol nah that doesn't sound good

[Sergeant Major]

How about aquaria cash?

[Perfectblue]

I just registered. Did not experience any problems.