Should we have a go at exporting the forum?

[Crash]

Seeing as people have to register manually ... should we try and do something with the forum to allow people to register more easily?That might boost our visitor levels.

[Shane]

I think it's a good idea.Might I also suggest that we reduce the number of sub forums (May not be a popular idea, but just a thought) many of them are rarely used. It all probably looks quite daunting on first glance and coupled with a messy registration procedure, I'm sure it's put off a few punters. Granted, the board is never likely to go back to the popularity of the late 90s early 00s, but there still must be plenty of crossover appeal with fans of Thunderbirds, Terrahawks, Power Rangers, etc.

[Crash]

Good suggestion.I tried to research the matter but the official Ikonboard (development is long since discontinued on it) makes my NOD32 go crazy with every page you visit.I think there must be something nasty there. NOD is seldom wrong. That's why I like it.It doesn't seem too difficult to port an Ikonboard database to PHPBB2 and from there you upgrade to PHPBB3 and when I looked their forum support people seemed really friendly and helpful.

[Shane]

I wouldn't know how to go about it myself as I haven't fiddled about with a forum in nearly 10 years, but I guess we need to keep all the old posts archived while ideally streamlining the amount of sub-forums,Here's a few ideas and I do stress it's just my personal opinion:The Star Fleet Section - Lose the Merchandise section as these topics could be discussed in the Show sub forum.The Eighties Section - I don't know if there's much point to this section, matters of this nature could be discussed in the Everything Else sub forum, granted the Terrahawks section could stay.The General Section - Lose the feedback sub forum, retain Everything Else sub forum.Star Fleet Creative Work Section - The most visited section so could be left largely unchanged. X-Bomber game sub forum definitely stays as does other creative work although the Genesis material could do with being combined with it although that's another matter that I'll go into shortly.Site Announcement Section - Not really sure if these are all that necessary as SFXB and Big Dai-X are no longer updated while Crash's updates are handled in his game sub forum.That would leave us with the following sub forums for the updated forum:The ShowOff Topic (Everything Else)Creative WorkX Bomber Game ProjectYou could also retain Genesis sub forum and have an all in one announcement feedback sub forum.Anyhoo, that's just me with my cold and calculated hatchet head on. The point is that this is Andy's forum and the existing sub sections relate to the interests of his website. I just think that now in 2011, with the fact that most of the old sites have gone down or are no longer being updated, having such an unwieldy forum, with so many unused sub sections and a difficult registration procedure is working against the goal of attracting new members.

[Crash]

I think a Sci-Fi forum would be more useful than an 80s forum. That might be worth keeping.I've tried to get the ball rolling. Time to just sit back and see what we can manage.

[Vanessa]

Whilst I'm unable to create a "new" forum or make any changes, I can comment on any possible changes mooted thus:I agree with what's been written by Shane and Crash about streamlining the different forum sections.We should definitely keep the older posts archived in a way that allows them to be easily accessed though.Having noticed that there has been an influx of non-genuine "new members" lately, of the 'on-line drugstore' variety, I wonder if making the registration process more easy might work against us?It certainly needs supervision, even if it is made more easy to register.

[Crash]

Yeah - auto-registration is back on but the spam programs can read the images as well as humans can these days.I think Andy took the view that there was so little interest in joining that it wasn't much worth making membership easier (???).I didn't understand that at all because if you made it possible to register, you would get more members.It didn't even tell you how to register before - little wonder that no-one was showing an interest.At least the spammers are restricting themselves to the "Other" section. Andy seems to be pretty quick about making it disappear.

[Vanessa]

So is it only Andy that can delete the non-genuine posts created by the spammers?I must admit that it took me quite a while of persistence to get on this forum. I guess that would have weeded out all but the most tenacious fans, although, as you say, it would have put many off.

[Crash]

I can moderate in my game part of the forum but we're all just folk everywhere else.The bots know to only cram their messages in forum sections with "other" and "miscellaneous" and so on in their titles so that they aren't 'too' obtrusive. I think if they didn't do something like that, it'd be all-out war with the spammers. They're not doing us too much harm.

[Zordon]

I've been checking the board receintly and we've been getting alot of spambots flying in and trying to get us to buy cheep knock off viagra and crap.It might be worth having Crash host a link to a forum then copy over everything we have from the last 6 months. just have a section with archived threads linking to here.