One of the steps the Board of Trustees is considering is upgrading or changing the criticaldance forum software.

Basically, the options are:

<ol></font></li></font></li>[*]<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Keep the current UBB software.</font></li>[*]<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Switch to Invision Power Board. You can see a demo of this software here.</font></li>[*]<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Switch to phpbb. You can see a demo of this software here.</font></li>[*]<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> Something else (Feel free to make suggestions).
[/LIST]

Comments, please.

Invision is the UBB used by Ballet Alert, right? If so, it seems to work well enough for me. The other looks slightly better, but without digging into their website a bit, it's really hard to tell what the functional differences are.

Do you have a short list of differences between the two?

--Andre

I like the current format and prefer it to the alternatives. The occasional "oops, I can't get a flock on the counter file" or whatever the message is doesn't offend me all that much. Unless there is a compelling reason, why mess with the classic(al) form?

<small>[ 01 March 2005, 09:41 PM: Message edited by: Poohtunia ]</small>

I agree with Poohtunia, I like the very clear, distinctive, present layout and think it would be a shame to change it.

I agree with Andrew, it would be useful to have a comparison of the increased functionality that we would have with these newer Board software packages.

Does the latest version of UBB offer more than the one we use, which I assume has been sperceeded?

How about some new graemlins for CriticalDance?

PHP and MySQL are where most of the new low cost, high performance development is going these days.

phpbb might be good to look at.

Then again, if everyone is happy with the current system, why change?

I'd prefer software that allows posters to use the tools we all know from MS Word (and other wp programs) -- hit "ENTER" for carriage return, Ctrl-I for Italics, etc. -- rather than the complex codes now required.

In terms of the overall presentation, I don't see any meaningful differences in the samples you post here. The real challenge comes in organizing the messages to make them easy to access, encouraging a wide range of responses.

I just remembered two useful features I'd like:

1. Central storage of the last time I accessed criticaldance.com. I read cd.com from multiple computers, and threads that are read on one computer are still marked as unread on another computer, even though I'm logged in as myself to the forum on both computers. This is probably because the current software stores information on the reading computer instead of the computer running the forum software. Other forum software handle this fine, and the storage requirements are minimal: only a timestamp of my last visit is necessary to figure out which articles I've read and which I haven't.

2. The search function is pretty painful to use when searching multiple forums because it's so slow. This may be a hidden benefit because it reduces bandwidth usage to the server. Other BBs I've used are actually very fast, and have some handy features to reduce bandwidth hogging by aggressive searching.

--Andre

Exciting news, folks!

On Monday, April 18, we'll be converting to phpBB2.

We don't anticipate any messages or user records being lost, but there will, of course, be some down time while the transition is being effected.

Seriously, I don't think there'll be any problems, but if there are, hey, I'll be outta town, so Azlan and Stuart will have to deal with them.

<small>[ 12 April 2005, 09:09 PM: Message edited by: salzberg ]</small>

The forum might be closed for several hours.

<small>[ 17 April 2005, 02:36 AM: Message edited by: Azlan ]</small>

I have just learned the news on the french board. Do you feel secure with that choice ? What about using vbulletin instead of phpbb ?

Hello, ALX. vBulletin is a commercial customization of phpBB and mySQL, as is Invision for that matter. This means we can easily upgrade from phpBB to any of these software if we need to.

;)

<small>[ 18 April 2005, 02:27 AM: Message edited by: Alx ]</small>