Posted by Edge on 12, 2000 at 7:07 PM:
In Reply to: New message board? Your vote will decide... Herein posted by saint on 12, 2000 at 4:03 PM:
The developers for phpBB seem very open to new comments and ideas, and since it is an open-source product, adding new features should be easy.
Also, I had a great idea. A lot of Ultimate Bulletin Board-like forums support graphical "smilies" in posts. Here on the BYOAC forum, we could come up with our own little tiny smilies based on classic arcade characters! Pac-Man is an obvious one, Mario, the little dragon guys from Bubble Bobble, etc. :-) I'll volunteer to do the "smiley replacements" if we go with a decent BB.
Also, the phpBB demo forum appears to have a very fast search feature. I tried it out today (I searched for the word "preview" in all forums) and it quickly located the matching posts.
phpBB is modeled after Ultimate Bulletin Board, (and intended to offer even more functionality) which the software used by the AVScience forums mentioned by Nickster earlier. UBB is probably the most common forum software around, and there are many clones. This makes it nice, since many people are already familiar with it.
Nice features of UBB-like forums are:
1) You can edit posts after you've made them to correct errors / add aditional information!
2) You can include HTML or special easy-to-remember forum "tags" to mark up your post. For example, you make things [B]Bold[/B], [I]Italic[/I] or include an [IMG]url_to_image.
3) There are lots of administrative options available to make maintaining the board easy
4) Moderators can assist the forum operator in maintaining a helpful setting (deleting off-topic/inflamatory posts)
5) You can send private messages to other registered forum members
etc...
If not phpBB, at least make it a UBB-style clone!