The forums have moved away from phpBB (that old creaky thing) and after a straight 3 hours of screwing around with code and databases, we have all the old forums, threads posts and most importantly users ported over!
However due to the unfortunate limitations to bbPress - our new forum provider - and phpBB - our old one - when it comes to being in any way compatible, a number of changes are having to be made.
- Images are currently not supported;
- There is absolutely NO private messaging system, nor one for forum signatures;
- All login names that used to contain spaces no longer will. bbPress doesn't allow them. Thus Tori Belliachi becomes ToriBelliachi
- A lot of the older posts are scrambled and do not contain line breaks nor formatting. I can repair these easily, but it's a very long manual process, so I only fixed recent postings;
- Things ARE going to be a little buggy, mainly due to the way that phpBB exports data and bbPress reads it. Usernames in older posts may be different, and the dates will be fairly buggy until the forum has settled in right.
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However, thanks to a little tinkering on my side and the help of a few plugins...
- BBCode now works! Which it originally didn't;
- The forums can now easily swap data with the main site and vice versa;
- Avatars are still available, and if you don't set one then one is specially made for ya!
- The chances of there ever being spambots ever again is effectively zero;
- Tagging, which allows the regular forum goer to educate the site on what topics are about. This allows for quicker and easier searching;
- It's quicker! A lot of the useless addons you got with phpBB aren't present in bbPress, giving you a quicker more streamlined experience;
- Easier to code, more a nice little help for me, but seriously this thang is a whiz to code for.
Enjoy it y'all!