TheWeeJenny.net

I went on a weird little spree with forum softwares yesterday. Once I’d settled on sticking with the one that was already there I found that I couldn’t install most of the plugins available for it, and that it was an incredibly long and arduous process to do something so simple as to drop a link back here somewhere, anywhere on the front page. Since there’s been no activity in it for 2 months I figured it was safe to tear it down and try a few new ones to see if they were any easier to admin. I did save my 2 member’s emails (since they’re my pals I think I’m supposed to keep them handy anyway) so when I’ve got something going I can either write ya or start a couple of profiles for you to tweak later. Whatever’s simplest and most secure.

Honestly, you’d think it wouldn’t be that tough. The problem is most forum softwares look and feel kinda oldschool, and while that isn’t necessarily a bad thing there is a little bit of tendency towards bloat. I don’t have a whole lot of room on this host (I do plan to upgrade eventually, at the moment I’m enjoying getting as much as I do for virtually peanuts) so I’d like to keep the used space down. I cleared about 60 megs just deleting that forum, and that was with just a couple of plugins and maybe 2 megs worth of avatars. :shock:

After that I spent all yesterday trying out different systems. I actually liked each of them but something in the admin interface bugged me in each one. Now I’m trying to asses which one was the least bothersome while still being functional. Right now I’m testing phpbb3. I think I like it best so far, but it’s really not ready for live usage. For some reason none of the new boards I create seem to show up at all, and I have no idea what else I need to enable to get that to work.

Of course, I had to stay up all night gaming with my night-shift working boyfriend so I may not resolve the issue today. I’ve left it alone and disabled signups. I’ll get elbow deep in it again just as soon as I can. I’ve got a ton of stuff to work on this week.

Sorry that all wasn’t very interesting. I get a bit focused when I decide something needs to be changed on a site and have a hard time talking about anything else while I’m working on it. I’ll try to think of something more interesting to talk about soon. :wink: