Forum Choice

Hi there. I am brand new, and this is my first post. I want to add a forum to my site, and I was looking at Snitz' "hall of fame", which included this forum from 2004. But when I clicked on it, it wasn't there. A little detective work led me here, and I immediately noticed you weren't using Snitz anymore (even though you were an award winner?!).

So I came here looking around, but quickly recognized that I couldn't contact ANYBODY on this site. I started to just say "f*** it" but decided to hang in and register. I see now that all that other information I was expecting has been hidden from the general public, presumably for privacy/spam reasons, which are pretty good ones.

So, first question: Why the switch from Snitz to phpBB? 2. Was this privacy functionality part it, or was it available from Snitz also? 3. I am also interested in the RSS functionalilty I see you have here. How is that working for you? 4. At present I have the shopping cart portion of my site on my own server, the main part is hosted elsewhere. So my next question is, is there a way to let my users log in ONE TIME for all my subdomains? 5. Even if they aren't all on the same machine?

Ok, that's enough for now. I want to know more, but there is such a thing as overload. Thanx and I look forward to hearing from you.

[Webforumz Staff]

To answer a few of your questions. A couple reasons for the change come to mind, the biggest one being that Snitz was a mess of code. We of course were tweaking it and adjusting it to try to get it running just the way we wanted and everywhere we turned we'd hit a maze of poor coding.

A lot of our efforts were toward trying to get XHTML and CSS compliance, and add some other useful modifications. Eventually after a lot of frustration we saw that phpBB came out of the box with a lot of what we were trying to achieve with Snitz, and there were plenty of quality mods to add extra features that we think are valuable.

Of course this forum has still gone through code modifications, largely done by Sirkent, but as a forum system I think we've all been very happy with it. In fact I've gone on to install this in a few of my other sites.

For the login question, you'd have to work out a way to pass the login information from server to server. It can be done, but how will depend on what your current setup is like.

[benbramz]

plus, trying to make phpbb look nice is each. i think snitz is ugly to the point of a self inflicted hurl

[Rob]

The lack of information to a non registered user is done entirely on purpose by us. These are code modifications with very specific reasons... privacy being a part... but 'only a part' of why we are doing this.

When google comes to our forum it takes on the role of 'non member' and there are things we clearly dont want it to index.

I've spent a fair bit of time today making some minor changes to make the site XHTML compatible.... PHPBB isnt compliant right outta the box.... it does need tweaking... especially when you start installing mods.

This is site is optimised for search engines (something I specialise in) and as an expert in this area I can tell you not a single forum I have used to date is going to come right outta the box and be freindly with google..... there are loads of modifications than need making no matter which forum you choose.

As Catalyst pointed out, we were just banging our heads against the wall with Snitz... don't get me wrong, it served us well, but when you need to move up a gear it has a long way to go.

Hope this helps.

[JohneeMac]

Iv got Invision 2.

I had to pay for it ( £40 ) but the features and options are second to none.