New forum

We have entered a new millenium... finally!

By Martin Joergensen

Our forum has never been the busiest place on The Global FlyFisher. For some reason our rather large crowd of visitors have never selected us to be their prime place to talk about things.

	Image file missing here  New and better  Martin Joergensen

And we have chosen to let that be as it was... for a long time. But one of our contributors—Chris del Plato—has been nagging me for a while to get something better, and the topic has been on the agenda a few times lately. So under a mild pressure from him, the partners and several others, I started looking into a new forum system.

phpBB
The old one was base on the Phorum software, which was one of the first open source forum systems based on PHP—the programming language that GFF uses. This had appeared in a new version, and I tested that for a while. It looked good (and a lot better than the old version), but people kept telling me that other and more recent systems were better.

I happened to get to work on a project with a Danish programmer who had contributed to phpBB, which is one of these newer and very widespread systems. After having looked into that, I decided to go ahead with that too. So for a while we have had these two systems running stealth on GFF. PhpBB seemed to be the best and richest of the two, and I have now adapted that to the look and feel of GFF. I have expanded it with an upload facility and it’s now out in the open.

Old posts Old posts and registrations have not been transferred. We save ouselves the workload of converting them and will at the same time get the log cleaned out. Hope you forgive us...!

Required login
It requires you to login in order to post. This will eliminate another problem we have had with the old forum: spam! Yes, some people actually spam forums... It’s a menace, makes the forum look bad and it takes time to prune out these unwanted posts. That should be taken care of now. The new forum only accepts posts from registered users and asks you to retype a visual code and confirm an email before you are accepted. This should keep the worst thugs outside the door.


Behave!
The rules are few and straightforward: behave!

The definition of that is more elaborately explained in the FAQ, which also holds some general instructions and advice regarding the use of the forum.

That’s all for now. Feel free to register and start using the new forum.