In celebration of our Tenth Anniversary online, we shall be upgrading our message board software to give members of the Ostomyland Community more features and flexability with their forums account and postings.
The website currently uses the phpBB2 message board software system, and it’s by far and away been the best of our four different message boards over the years, however with the release of the latest version of the software the time has come to upgrade to the far superior phpBB3 system. This will happen later on in January, after the anniversary on the 21st, or maybe in early to mid February. Announcements will be made here and on the current message board when the changeover period approaches.
This is an exciting time for the Ostomyland website, the new phpBB3 system brings lots of new features to the forums and it’s user accounts. Heres a taster of some of the features to come:
- User controlled text sizes
- Separate printer friendly pages, with no graphics or colours.
- Greatly enhanced user control panel allows greater customisation of your account
- Bookmark favourite threads to return to later
- Friends (and enemies) lists. Get notification who’s online when you come to the board.
- Greatly improved message posting page
- The [quote] tags WORK! Yayyy!
- And literally lots, LOTS more…
Whilst the news of a new message board system is exciting news for the admin team and most users, I do appreciate that people will be apprehensive about losing their post tally, losing all their existing posts and having to register for their username account. Well, we’ve got GREAT news for anyone who may be worried about this. MOST of the existing posts, private messages and active registered user accounts will be transferred over to the new system thanks to its inbuilt conversion program that we’ll run before the new board goes live to the public.
The only change will be a new URL address to the board, as its a totally separate installation from the existing one. The new URL will be announced when the installation is complete and fully tested. However, as with any automatic conversion progress there may be a few lost posts, or corrupted posts, and likewise with members user accounts but that vast proportion of the current database will be there, ready and waiting for you upon live launch.
Finally, for the conversion of the database to happen, I need to close the current message board down for 24hours. Maybe up to 48 if I arse things up. lol. When that board returns you’ll find that there will be just one post left, and that tells you where to go to find the new board. I will, of course, announce when I’ll need to close the board down in advance, both on here and on the board iteself. 
So, keep an eye on the message board for details of when the exciting change will occur.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:39 am
testing comments