My peoples, huddle up and listen...

With how crazy and hectic everything has been, it feels like there has been some lack of communication to everyone explaining what's happening besides the scenes as far as what to expect here in the near future from this website.

First and foremost: the current forum software that we are using (phpBB) is going away. Soon. Very soon.

The reasoning behind it was established by Sharp (our sysadmin, DBA extraordinary and programming wizard) and I several months back as we would discuss (theoretically) what it would take to write a good piece of forum software as we felt like nearly all off-the-shelf solutions were... bad. To put it lightly. The primary goal with this forum is scalability, performance, and to hopefully never ever see a 500 Internal Server Error again. In our minds, it is not acceptable for the site to be down for more than even a minute when traffic to the site goes crazy.

Sharp put in a lot of effort (and I mean a lot) into conceptualizing and executing our database schema in PostgreSQL to leverage it for the most performant integration possible. This has been finished this morning based on our blueprint and was quite a bit difficult to pull off.

My end of this involves utilizing my expertise in User Experience/User Interface design and front-end development to actually make something out of this. The core forum experience will be ready either tonight or tomorrow.

I define the core forum experience as follows:

  • User Accounts with a basic profile
  • Forums with sub-forums
  • Ability to create a thread
  • Ability to reply to a thread
  • Basic moderation (deleting threads/posts, ability to ban users)
  • Responsive design

I am also shooting to possibly have this ready for launch:

  • Subscriptions
  • Read receipts

The other big focus from my end is to provide a great and user friendly experience. The standard phpBB user experience will not cut it. Neither will what other forum software provides. This will be a long-term work in progress and the first version of the site you see will be a bit rougher, but it should evolve over time to become something you want to use and come back to.

We will have a name and domain by tomorrow night. We will also do a proper migration to the new forum where user accounts will transfer over.

We have also discussed a future roadmap of how to expand beyond just a forum, and I welcome others to let you guys in on that and what it will entail.

Please be patient with us, as this current forum is only the first step and what we call version 0.1. Look out for version 1.0 soon. Feel free to provide feedback and ask as many questions as you wish and we'll try to answer them if we have an answer!
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