This board's software sucks rancid tuna

[Tdarcos]

Ben will recognize where the phrase in title came from.

I just realized what is wrong here. Typically, when someone posts a new topic, new ones appear before old ones. So, if I post a topic and it appears between a couple of entries, it would be presumed that those are fairly recent. Oh, no, I posted a topic that appears just after one that the first message in that topic was posted in 2004.

Okay, so it's showing by recent posts to a topic, fine, so it should show the last few entries. Oh no, it starts with the first post and you'd have to follow the entire thread from roughly four years ago.

Typically, someone looking at a message board wants to see relatively recent messages and, unless everything is very old, is usually not interested in messages posted, oh, say, more than six months ago. Freshest material should show first, which is the usual practice, say, on Usenet forums.

Hell, I think even WWIV handled this sort of thing better, yes, messages were shown in posting order, but the board had a limit to how many items it would show per section, and as new messages were posted, older ones dropped off. It made the display relatively fresh as you could skip forward to, say, the last ten messages because it indicated how many were present. Your best capacity here is where the software decides there should be a page break, you can skip forward to one or more pages.

With all that we have in capacity, you'd think someone could have done a better job designing the user interface of the software that runs this board.

Not that I'm trying to toot my own horn, but if you look at my blog at http://paul-robinson.us you would see that new messages appear first, then older ones. You see the freshest material, first.

[Worm]

Yeah, wouldn't this however leave any thread that's been going on awhile horribly hard to find unless stickied? Dude you replied to 2004, fucking man up and move on.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah, this slop has no way to go to the last posts in a given thread. phpBB2 sucks.

Here's the issue though - getting your db from php itself DOES NOT WORK because it times out everywhere. I can also not get a good backup from my web host.

So I need to find a solution so we can go to phpBB3. Honestly, at this point, I'd pay for vBulletin if they could concert the rows and tables correctly. I hate phpBB with a fucking passion.

I am with this host until April 2009, but come December I plan on taking a few days off and coming up with a modern-day solution to the BBS. So, er, if you are still with us here then, you at least have that to look forward to!