The Future of the Forum?

[Bart]

Hi all,

As many of you have noticed, the Forum has long been in a state of disrepair. Email alerts don't work, preventing me from being able to approve posts in a timely manner. A phpBB software update was attempted years ago but completely failed. I'm generally too busy to actively moderate and I would hate to foist this responsibility on anyone else.

That said, I would like to preserve the Forum for historical purposes. There are a lot of really interesting posts here! Maybe someday I could even resurrect a new Forum once I'm able to contribute to Supermodel again.

Going forward, how would everyone feel if I locked the Forum and Discord became the new hub of Supermodel community activity?

-- Bart

[Ian]

Um, personally I find the forum very useful. It's useful for support stuff etc ..
Discord is great but you quickly get lost in a sea of chat. If it still works just leave it up? How much moderation is required?

[MrThunderwing]

Yeah, I totally agree with Ian about the sea of chat on Discord. It's not a bad thing, but I think information about updates et cetera could easily get overlooked. I much prefer the forum style for finding out about specific info. Unlike some other forums I've frequented in the past, everyone on the Supermodel forum tends to be polite and respectful of one another, so I don't think you'd need to worry too much about having to moderate people's posts because they're being jerks. If it ain't broke and all that...

[Bart]

I wonder if I should try to install a new version of phpBB and see if it works, then leave this one locked. The first two posts from any user have to be moderated. I do this because there are still occasional spam bots and troublemakers that want to break in and spam the forum. The other problem is that because forum emails don't work for some inexplicable reason, people often lock themselves out and email me for help. It's not too frequent but it can be surprisingly difficult to keep up if you're busy.

I also really like the forums and would really love to see them remain a hub of the Sega 3D emulation community. Let me look into setting up a new install of phpBB this weekend. I'm being generously hosted for free, which is awesome, but it might be time to look into a paid hosting solution that will give me finer-grained access to the underlying machine. AWS? I don't know what people do these days...

[nikescar]

That's a tough spot. Just doing some googling, it looks like what people are doing is incremental upgrades. So if you're on php 5.0 and phpbb 1.0, upgrade to the latest phpbb version that is compatible with php 5.0. Then upgrade php to the latest version that is compatible with the just upgraded phpbb. Repeat until on the latest versions.

Honestly, sounds like a pain in the butt. I'd offer help during the process but my web knowledge is purely based on my google-fu.

[nikescar]

The phpbb community looks pretty helpful though. They have a form you can fill out and post. They've helped a few people do these very old to new upgrades.

[dan76]

I've been a member for a few years but rarely post. I look in once or twice a month and would hate to see the forum go. The work is much appreciated.

[Toshiko]

Honestly, I wound up ditching phpBB for SMF after the issues I had upgrading. Rather ironic that migration was the easier task.

[fefor]

Hey there, I'd also rarely ever post but I've been a member and lurked for years and it'd be sad to see it go, personally each time I deleted something instead of archiving it I regretted it later, so it would be cool if the place could stay up for the old members.

[icuk7]

I also like this forum format Bart.
Discord is great, but it's difficult to find old posts and stuff.

It would be unfortunate if the old posts on this forum were lost.
But, I'd also respect whatever you felt was best going forward mate.

Thanks.