Future of classicamiga

[Harrison]

we are quite short of female members already in the Amiga world, so I would rather not try to scare them away!

[Kin Hell]

Wouldn't it be better to migrate Forums for all?

At least giving them a chance to respond to their last logged Email address with the 0ld site. - Email all members informing of the update. - After all, you're just changing the way the site looks. The Web Hosting still stays the same... Yes?

& why kill your membership "number count" just for a site upgrade?

Fresh start??

[Harrison]

I think you misunderstand. I'm not removing any existing members, and the forums will be migrated fully as is to the new software when I do it. But it will change because of the new software obviously. But is that enough to entice old members back?

[Stephen Coates]

If the main site doesn't get updated much, would it be better to make everything into static pages, that way, there are no security issues and no old software to maintain. The old (early 2000s) site was very well designed and easy to use so I expect something similar wouldn't be too hard to make.

As for the forums, we did have a completely fresh start back in the mid 2000s, and of course, all these years later, Invisionfree is no more. I can't see any reason why the current forum cannot be migrated to something else. I'm not too familiar with Xenforo (is that the fork of vBulletin?). A lot of people seem to like SMF these days; it is quite nice as an end user, but I've no idea if you can migrate a vBulletin database to it. Is phpBB still developed?

[Harrison]

It would be impossible to turn the main site into static pages. The whole site is dynanically generated from a database and there are a lot of entries in the game and demo databases. I forget the total but its over 3000 total pages.

The best solution would be to write some code that could pull the directory pages table entries from the existing site and populate the data in a new site running more up to date software. That is something I would love to do. I built the existing site when I had a lot of spare time and learnt a whole new coding language built within the Jreviews Joomla software specifically for this reason. I worked withthe creator and developer of JReviews to create the site directories. I was helping him develop his software as I was using it to make the site and he was impressed what I managed to do with the software. I achieved far more then he ever thought the software could do. But then as I'd been working in new media production for years I had learnt to push a language or software system to I'd limit or to work around limitations. Something I've always found fun to do.

Anyway, it would be a big project fully move the content of the current main site to a new platform. Might even be easier just to start again and build a new site and then manually repopular the entries. But not any time soon.

As for forums, SMF, phpBB and any other free forums are but an option. In being free and open source they are not aecure and only ok for small starting forums.

Xenforo is the best commercial forum platform after I did an extensive test of them all and ac more of research. Xe foro is build by the developers who originally created vBulletin. When vBulletin was taken over during vBulletin 4 years some of the original people on the project didn't like the direction it was heading and left. And they were right. vBulletin 5 is horrible. These people who left wanted to create their vision of that they wanted the next vBulletin to be and created XenForo.

You can see and feel similar ideas in many aspects of Xnmenforo, but it's far more elegantly coded and the UI is far more up to date and cleaner. Most importantly. Most of the mod and plugin devs from vBulletin left after vBulletin 5 turned out to be a mess. They are all now developing addons and mods for Xenforo instead.