So, as we are all (hopefully) aware, we finally made the jump to phpBB 3! (Woo!!)
The problem is (while phpBB is still really nice and reliable) that phpBB is getting old by forum standards. It doesn't have this or that, and it's just bulky all around (looking at you, pages).
Recently, though, I became aware of a couple forum projects: Xenforo and Discourse. Xenforo won't work too well because, well, it's way too expensive. Discourse, though, does look pretty good and we can do a lot with it. Maybe we can use this as our next step in the evolution of our little corner of the internet? It's not perfect, but it does have some really cool things:
- No more pages (makes discussions easier to track, and everything's on one page)
- Very easy for noobs to learn, and is quite powerful
- Looks awesome, and is very easily themable (Twokinds background, anyone?)
- Really fast
- Shiny badges
- User tagging system (@username)
- Notifications when people reply to your post/thread
- Live updates of threads (new posts are shown instantly)
- No more pages (The Panel Shuffle thread would be a pain to load)
- Not as much room for expansion
- Fewer/worse moderation tools (no per-category mods yet, per-board permissions don't really exist, etc)
- Very hard to set up, and can be annoying to maintain
- Tagging system can be abused (fixable)
- Old computers won't be able to really handle it
Sorry for making this sound so spammy. I just really think that it might be a good fit for this forum -- provided a couple redesigns are made.