General Forum Cleanup, New Home, more on the way!

[twhiting9275]

I've been a rather busy individual this weekend, from dealing with hardware issues (more on that later), upgrading these forums, moving things around, and generally cleaning this place up a bit. Why? Because I care, and because I want to make it easier to find what you're looking for without having to go through 50 forums.

Let's start with the downtime. I'm not going to go into WHAT happened, or WHY things happened, at least not yet, as I'm still poking through the rubble. What I will say is this:

Because of the downtime of the past few weeks (yeah, I've noticed it, and I'm as unhappy as you are), I'm moving couple things around. This will open up a method of communication so that IF things happen again, you will always be able to get messages through to us, and us to you. The forums (these forums) have moved off to another server (a vps), in order to keep a line of communication open if something goes bad.

Now, a bit more about the new direction and new features of the support forums here.


Firstly, you'll notice that the individual (phpbb2,phpbb3, etc) forums are gone. Why? Because it was just a messy way to do things. Instead, what we have NOW is one consolidated OpenDNS.

So, you might ask "How do I differentiate between phpbb2 and phpbb3?", which, of course, is a good question. Each sub-forum inside of the support forum now has what are known as 'prefixes'. In order to submit a thread, you must first choose a prefix, and (of course) a valid subject.

When you go to look at these forums, you can tell the forum to JUST show a certain prefix. For example, if you looked here, you would see, at the bottom of the page, a display option for prefix. I've added the used prefixes in, and you can easily display ONLY those. Now, there's no way to set this permamently, at least for now, but I'm sure that over time this will be added to the VB setup.

This brings a bit of a cleanup process, which I started, and should have completed, this morning. You may notice that your post has been moved around, and that's because of this. You may ALSO notice that your post has been edited by myself. Please note that I didn't remove ANY content at all from the post, I merely added the appropriate tag, to get us started.

There were a couple of posts (threads) that were split, and a couple of threads that were deleted. The split ones were so that I can keep information in one place, and questions in another. The deleted ones were all my own, in an effort to reduce redundancy .


Secondly, you will notice a new thing in profiles, called 'credits'. Don't pay too much attention to this , for the moment, as I'm still working with this. For now, they're an encouragement to post, partitipate in the forums. Eventually, you'll be able to use them to purchase things, such as advertisement free forums, backups for forums, etc. I'm far from complete there, just give it time. Rome wasn't built in a day, and this place won't be. We are, however, well on our way.

TJWI was created just over a year ago with only simpleforums. In that time, simpleforums has grown to over 500 forums, with tens of thousands of posts. Since the creation, we've added phpbb3, and phpbb2 forums, both under 6 months old, BOTH hitting 250+ forums and thousands of posts. We couldn't do it without you, the users. Thank you!

Keep up the great work, keep them forums and ideas coming. It's been a very, very long couple days so I'm off to try to get a short nap in.

Tom