Wowfunhappy wrote:I know some people think we should switch to another forum system, such as SMF, and I'm open to the possibility if enough people want it. However, I really think it's a bad idea. I haven't seen any SMF forums that look nearly this nice, and while a base forum is simple to set up, adding features can be difficult. The Voxelus forum used SMF, and Adz had a lot of difficulty with conflicting and even broken plugins that couldn't even be uninstalled properly. Prior to Stratosphir, Atmosphir's forum was also based on SMF, and it had constant technical problems, such as the infamous Tuesday downtime. That's the reason why, for the launch of Stratosphir, Minor Studios decided to develop their own forum system, completely in-house.
I really like Xenforo a lot, it's not perfect but it's a lot better than the alternative systems out there. I really like this theme too—I did choose it, after all—but if someone can find another one, switching over wouldn't take too much work. I bought the current theme from [url]http://razorthemes.com;[/url] they make a lot of nice looking stuff. They're not free (I think this one cost ~$40), but I wouldn't mind spending a small amount of money.
Also, making small changes to the forum's appearance is easy—we made quite a few modifications to theme we're currently using. Any image—the buttons, the navigation bars, the icons—can be replaced with another image of the same size, really easily. All we need is an alternate image. So if there's something in particular you don't like the look of, feel free to try making a modified version. If there's an image you can't seem to save to your hard drive, post here and I'll give you a download link. Background colors and stuff should also be pretty easy to change.
Swords761 wrote:Screw SMF; can you look into MyPHP?
PHPBB forums are super simplistic compared to what we have now. It's newer than SMF, but it was still created a loooong time ago, and it shows. That said, said simplicity isn't always bad.Wowfunhappy wrote:You mean phpbb right? I've actually always loved phpbb forums, but we never really considered using it for OMB. I'm not sure why.
Do you have any experience with it Swords? This is kind of dumb but their website is kind of daunting.
Edit: Okay, this doesn't actually look difficult at all. It's definitely a possibility.
Here's an example phpbb forum. There's a dropdown at the top with a bunch of different themes. Most of them are crappy. Can anyone find some nice ones? We can also customize them to an extent, of course, but we'll need a good base to work off of.
My preference is still Xenforo, as I think it feels much more modern and complete. That said, phpbb is extremely stable and well made software that I'm confident wouldn't result in any technical issues. If people want to switch, it's a perfectly viable alternative.