Hey all.
As time goes on, phpbb gets more dated.. and sites like facebook continue to take eyeballs away from web forums, which is a shame because facebook does a very bad job of keeping content and making it searcheable, etc. Also, you do not own your content on facebook, and then there's the evilness of Zuckerberg and co :|
Ironically, i'm responsible for starting ES Facebook at a time when there were no ebike groups on facebook and it looked like we were going to lose the forum to an investor. Eventually the facebook group grew to be almost as big as the forum , and honestly i'm a little ashamed that it turned out that way. But the reason is that facebook has modern features and is much more useable than phpbb.
We hit a wall with phpbb last year. We spent many days investigating alternatives and came up empty handed. We are sort of stuck with it due to the 11 years of content we have. No convertor is able to properly move our 7 gigabytes of text over to a more modern message board software either.
Since we are not ad supported ( thank god ) and non-profit, i'm wondering how many of you would be willing to donate by patreon to fund improvements to the site
The first project would be one of the following ( still undecided ):
1) build a convertor that properly ports our content to a newer platform, or fix an existing one that is broken.
2) add modern features to the phpbb codebase and contribute to all phpbb web forums as a whole.
3) build extensions for phpbb that give us the features we've always wanted.
Any excess money would go to:
1) help pay the hosting bill
2) coffee money for the sysadmin(s)
3) beer money for the moderators.... they need it :lol:
So this is just a tester to see if anyone would be interested.. please fill out the poll.. any feedback would be helpful too.
As time goes on, phpbb gets more dated.. and sites like facebook continue to take eyeballs away from web forums, which is a shame because facebook does a very bad job of keeping content and making it searcheable, etc. Also, you do not own your content on facebook, and then there's the evilness of Zuckerberg and co :|
Ironically, i'm responsible for starting ES Facebook at a time when there were no ebike groups on facebook and it looked like we were going to lose the forum to an investor. Eventually the facebook group grew to be almost as big as the forum , and honestly i'm a little ashamed that it turned out that way. But the reason is that facebook has modern features and is much more useable than phpbb.
We hit a wall with phpbb last year. We spent many days investigating alternatives and came up empty handed. We are sort of stuck with it due to the 11 years of content we have. No convertor is able to properly move our 7 gigabytes of text over to a more modern message board software either.
Since we are not ad supported ( thank god ) and non-profit, i'm wondering how many of you would be willing to donate by patreon to fund improvements to the site
The first project would be one of the following ( still undecided ):
1) build a convertor that properly ports our content to a newer platform, or fix an existing one that is broken.
2) add modern features to the phpbb codebase and contribute to all phpbb web forums as a whole.
3) build extensions for phpbb that give us the features we've always wanted.
Any excess money would go to:
1) help pay the hosting bill
2) coffee money for the sysadmin(s)
3) beer money for the moderators.... they need it :lol:
So this is just a tester to see if anyone would be interested.. please fill out the poll.. any feedback would be helpful too.