Post by K Phoenix on Apr 9, 2013 22:39:22 GMT -5
Let me preface this by saying that:
1. I know you guys left the self-hosted vBulletin forum for a number of reasons, one of which was disliking the admin panel and other features compared to the simpler layout and featureset of Zetaboards. I also know there was some reluctance toward switching away from ZB in general because you guys were comfortable with it. Zetaboards is a perfectly good piece of forum software that absolutely gets the job done; we're all used to it and we can all work with it just fine, and if it ain't broke then don't fix it. The thing is that while Zetaboards is good, I think ProBoards is better and would provide more benefits for us in the long run. If you guys disagree with me that is totally fine and I'm happy to drop the issue, or at least come back to it later, but I think this is worth at least a look.
2. I am still working on that last opening storyline post. I'd meant for it to be done weeks ago and I apologize for taking this long, but a combination of being abnormally tired, distracted-as-usual and dissatisfied with the direction the intro was taking really ate up a lot of time. I've since come up with an idea I like a lot more and hope that I'll be able to finish it up soon. I was originally going to wait until I had finished it to bring up the potential switch because I wanted us to be totally done, but thinking about it now it makes more sense to give you guys the extra time to play around/think things over while I finish the intro.
3. Even if you guys do like this idea but just don't want to do it now, that's fine! We can consider moving to a different platform at any time; we don't need to rush. If OI could move all the profiles and necessary threads from ZB to IPB, we can certainly do the same thing. The reason I bring it up now, before we've actually opened the RP, is that while moving later is possible, it would be easier to move now while we don't have all the profiles and extra stuff to worry about transfering. It'd save us a lot of work to move sooner rather than later.
4. Related to points 2 and 3 above, the reason I wanted to bring this up now is because there'll be minimal work involved either way. If we decide to move, we just set up the forum, transfer the necessary threads, move the domain and get started. If we don't... we just get started. Simple no matter what the ultimate decision is.
All that out of the way, and just to summarize what I'm getting at, I'd like to consider us switching from Zetaboards to ProBoards. I've spent some time playing with ProBoards while stuck on the intro post and have compiled a list of all the important pros and cons. The lists are a little lengthy, so I've spoiler tagged them.
- The forum will still be free and still be on a well-known and robust platform—one that, in my observation, is doing a bit better at actually implementing user requests and other features at this time.
- I'm not sure how many other ProBoards forums you guys have spent time on or whether you've looked at their old admin panel, but while the front end of the forum worked well enough (and could be made to look very pretty and heavily customized), the ACP interface was pretty crappy. vBulletin may have made a million different options that looked confusing, but this had very few options in an ugly layout that wasn't terribly intuitive. ProBoards is now moving on to version 5 of their software, which is a complete rewrite that not only makes everything (especially the admin panel) much easier on the eyes by default but is also adding a ton of features that their old-school software didn't have when all the competitors had picked them up quite some time ago. It's a massive improvement and is looking very sharp and functional.
- As of v5, ProBoards either has built-in features or plugins/codes equal to or better than what ZB has or what we've added. By default it has HTML pages and customizable portal widgets, a built-in shoutbox that autorefreshes and allows guest shouts (though we should still be able to put the Chatango box on a page if we ultimately prefer that), custom profile fields that allow links, fully-implemented "who's online/who's been online" features, and more. It has a nice sidebar plugin that I was able to tweak so that it collapsed and remembered its state just like ours. I was also able to redo the code for our custom BBCode (sprites, admin edit, etc.) so that they'd work on PB. (Actually the way I did it will work fine on ZB too, and in fact may be slightly better than our current code, so I may switch us over to that no matter what.)
- Another feature included by default is a customizable news fader that displays at the top of the homepage, which would let us post links to the latest TA, share any quick announcements, be a nice place to mention swarms if we do something like that, etc..
- It has searchable post labels/tags we can define in the ACP. For example, we could use these to mark IRP threads, or maybe mark a question in the help forum as "resolved", or tag TA threads as being different from more general announcements, things like that.
- There's an optional WYSIWYG post editor for members who want to see their posts as they type rather than relying solely on BBCode. Both WYSIWYG and BBCode modes, as well as the quick-reply, include a post draft feature to help prevent members from losing long posts in progress.
- The default theme is mobile-friendly if people want to check in with their phones or tablets. There's also a ProBoards app for iOS and Android, though it's not free so any member who wanted to use it would need to pay 2.99 for it.
- The v5 plugin architecture works more like traditional forum/software plugins that you just have to install and configure rather than copying/pasting and editing JavaScript, though it does also support ZB-style JavaScript template mods for things that don't have plugins. And even though the software is new, there are still a respectable number of plugins available. I've already mentioned the sidebar plugin and and have also tested a spoiler plugin (which still needs some tweaking, I'll admit) and a plugin that adds BBCode buttons to the quick reply; there are also other cool things like an awards/achievements system. See the current lists of plugins, template changes and also useful tweaks for examples of what's available and what's customizable.
- Themes are installed in a similar way to plugins and are easier to customize without necessarily wading through a whole CSS file (which I personally prefer, haha, but it'd make things simpler for everyone else). There's a visual theme editor that can be played around with and everything, and even that is enough to tweak the default theme into something more interesting.
- One of my favorite additions to v5 is a "bookmarking" feature that works like the topic notifications on IPB, popping up a little bubble (or even email you) to let you know that someone has posted in your thread and thus making it trivial to tell as soon as a mod has updated you. It's much better than ZB's "subscriptions", which don't notify you of anything and there's no way to add that functionality without a code that's not quite the same thing (it's not optional, for example—it's on for all members whether they care about it or not—and it only tracks threads the user started and so is useless if you're doing IRP in the other player's thread or otherwise following a topic you didn't start) or maybe with a separate browser addon or something.
- There are some advanced social features like the ability to link to/tag a member in a post with a Twitter-like "@username", which can optionally give that user a notification (e.g. if I post "Hey chronicler, thanks for getting the daycare!" the post will link to his profile and the board will let him know I mentioned him). You can also choose to be notified if someone quoted one of your posts.
- v5 includes a post "liking" system that we can use kind of like OI's RePG or just have in general so people can show their appreciation for others' posts. It's fully-fledged and properly integrated with user accounts so it works better than the ZB options, though at least at this point it doesn't seem possible to restrict it to certain forums. Personally I'm not super concerned about that, but maybe we could ask for that option as a feature request. Likes, as with bookmarks and username tags, can optionally send users notifications as well. All notifications for these things and more can be configured—you can turn on email notifications, turn off in-forum bubble notifications and even turn off a notification type entirely, for example if you don't want it alerting you every time you've been quoted.
- You can also "follow" members you're interested in. For example, if I decide I really like DF's RP then I can follow him and see whenever he starts a new thread or posts in it, as well as possibly following other things he does around the board.
- There are also "status updates"; they can't be replied to like OI's but they're more visible than ZB's version, usually included right in the member's miniprofile.
- PMs are "conversation"-style, as on IPB, so they behave like private threads and can involve multiple participants talking at once. This could be useful for events where we have players team up as in OI's Rocket4Ever, and could conceivably be useful for quick private staff discussions or private communication for clans if needed.
- There's a detailed user reporting panel for admins and gmods (apparently not regular mods, though in our case that would just be RPG mods so it doesn't matter) that lets staff have a discussion about how to handle the report and the member. Staff can suggest courses of action, like whether they want to ban a member or disable their account. The report panel provides links for immediate action on the post (moving it, locking the thread, etc.), an overview of the reported post and whether there are any staff notes about the member, etc..
- For a bit of extra novelty there's a Flash-based avatar creator. This is mostly silly and I'm sure a lot of people will just upload the same avatars they would have anyway, but it's there and maybe people might want to make some cartoony version of their RP character, I dunno.
- v5 supports a "global login" with other ProBoards forums and accounts. If any of our affiliates are on ProBoards, for example, then it'll be easy for members who are on both Turquoise and that affiliate to link their accounts together (it wouldn't share their posts or anything, the forums are still entirely separate, but it might be nice to only have to login once).
- While I haven't investigated it myself yet, it looks like there's an "export posts and PMs" option for people who use the ProBoards global accounts. If I'm understanding that correctly, members will have that if they want backups of the posts they've made or conversations they've had, which is cool.
- v5 also has "badges" that can be given to other members, but these are separate from achievements/awards, they aren't customizable as far as I can tell and they cost money, so I doubt most of us will bother with them. Still, they're there if members want to mess around with them or show someone else their appreciation.
- It comes with better forum search, a slicker interface, a forum directory that actually works (ZB's is currently broken) so we can do a bit of advertising there... more up-to-date and shiny everything, really.
- Using a custom domain isn't free—it's $14/year on top of whatever we're paying for the domain itself. If we "convert" from Zetaboards we could get the first year free (along with three months of no ads), though.
- The v5 software is still in beta and will be until later this month. It appears to be functional and plenty of people have already converted their existing v4.5 forums for general use, but it will mean that there may occasionally be bugs while they work out the kinks. Personally I think it'll be worth it if everyone else agrees this software is superior to ZB, but it is something to keep in mind and that we'll have to tell the members about until everything is ironed out for the full release.
- Everyone who has already joined would have to re-register, of course, and none of the old posts would carry over (we'd still have this forum as an archive, though).
- The signature limit is hard-coded at 500 characters. At the very least there are the custom profile fields that people can put links to their profiles in, so as long as we make sure people put links there then they won't need to waste precious sig space on that, but it is still uncomfortably small.
- There are no built-in member blogs, although if we wanted to we could go back to the "blog forum" idea.
- It looks like custom usertitles are only admin-editable rather than user editable, although that's pretty minor and people can use the "status updates" to achieve a similar effect.
-Of course, we'll need to hunt for some new themes. The current list of v5 themes is here, though unfortunately there are only a few good ones at this point (I installed the only ones I was satisfied with on my test board). I will note that people have also designed/requested some really awesome themes for ProBoards in the past, though, and while I'd prefer ours remained relatively clean and simple (my problem with a lot of "fancy" forum themes is that they get so caught up in tiny detailed fonts and huge images that just reading the forum index gets annoying), but it should be more than possible to get something that looks really nice and can still actually be read by a normal person. I may try my hand at creating a few themes on my own down the road, even. (It also doesn't have a quick theme-changer dropdown by default, either, but there appears to be a plugin we could use to add something similar. )
- ProBoards doesn't have the "autotools" for topics and members that ZB has, e.g. setting up a tool that can automatically move banned members into the "banned" group. We'd have to do that manually if necessary, although it'd only be a few extra steps (and can done from the member's profile, in addition to banning them from there).
- It also doesn't have a moderation queue (i.e. a forum where posts don't appear until staff approves them). We don't currently need anything like that, but if for example we wanted to do E4 challenges the way OI does with the player and updater posting attacks in special threads the updater can't see until they're ready to make the battle post, we'd have to find another way.
- The v5 update has PB using slightly different BBCode syntax for some things (for example [nocode][a] tags for links instead of [url][/nocode]); it seems like most of the old syntax is automatically converted to the new so there shouldn't be much of a problem even if we keep using the old for a while, but we'd probably have to go through the RP sticky posts and tweak them a little to make sure they display correctly on the new forum.
- It's not self-hosted and it's not a publicly available piece of software, which means that while we don't have to handle maintenance/updates ourselves we're also not in control of our own data and backups and such. ProBoards is every bit as robust a service as Zetaboards is—I think it's actually been around a little longer than ZB's parent company, even—and they do keep backups and respond to forum restoration requests, but we are ultimately at their mercy if something bad happens. Granted this is also a problem with using ZetaBoards (and you'll both remember the issue OI's old ZB server had better than I will since I joined a few months after that happened), and my true ideal would be to get ourselves some proper self-hosting, but we're not in a position to do that or to ask members for money toward the hosting or software (not that I think we need to spend money on paid software anyway) at this point, so it's mostly moot.
As you can see, the list of pros drastically outweighs the list of cons, even without taking the really minor stuff into consideration! I can go on and on about this all I like, but ultimately you guys would be admins there as well and all my words mean nothing if you don't have a chance to test for yourselves. That's not a problem! I've created a test board and a set of test accounts that you guys can use to play around and see what you think of how everything works. Go to turquoisetest.proboards.com and login with the username "[REDACTED]" and password "[REDACTED]", and you'll have a selection of demo accounts you can choose to log into. The most important for you guys would obviously be the "Test Admin" account, since that will let you play around with all the administrative features, but you can test any of the major usergroups (gmod, mod, regular member, guest) as well. (I didn't include any of our more specific groups like VIPs or Community Mods because those are just matters of responsibilities and view permissions rather than a significantly different set of moderating options.) You can also easily switch between accounts by clicking the little people icon in the tiny menu in the bottom-right corner.
Feel free to do whatever you want with the admin accounts: post, add forums, delete forums, change settings, move members into different groups, pretty much anything. The only thing I ask of you is not to ban any accounts (though you can "disable" them, which is sort of like a temporary ban). I made that "Test Jerk" account because I wanted to experiment with banning options, but it turns out it's not possible to ban just one account on a global account—the entire global account, and all accounts on it (including the admin account!) will be banned from that forum instead. I mean, I dunno, since the admin account you're using is on the same account as all the others, maybe it won't let you ban yourself... but avoid the option just in case, or otherwise I'll have to come in and unban you so you can keep testing things. (The "Test Jerk" account does say that it's banned, but that's just a "Banned" usergroup I put it into; it's not actually banned and still has all the same access rights as a regular member.)
If you like, we can also ask the members (those who are still around, heh) whether they want to switch and let them test things out as well; if so we'd need to create an entirely new global account for them, new email and all, since giving them access to the demo account above will also let them play with admin options they don't need to see.
Take ProBoards for a test drive and see what you think, and let me know if there's an important new feature you like or existing ZB feature that's missing that I forgot about. As said above, if you guys don't like it then you don't like it and that's the end of it, and I don't want to do anything unless all of the staff is totally on board with it. I do think it's at least worth taking a solid look at, though.
1. I know you guys left the self-hosted vBulletin forum for a number of reasons, one of which was disliking the admin panel and other features compared to the simpler layout and featureset of Zetaboards. I also know there was some reluctance toward switching away from ZB in general because you guys were comfortable with it. Zetaboards is a perfectly good piece of forum software that absolutely gets the job done; we're all used to it and we can all work with it just fine, and if it ain't broke then don't fix it. The thing is that while Zetaboards is good, I think ProBoards is better and would provide more benefits for us in the long run. If you guys disagree with me that is totally fine and I'm happy to drop the issue, or at least come back to it later, but I think this is worth at least a look.
2. I am still working on that last opening storyline post. I'd meant for it to be done weeks ago and I apologize for taking this long, but a combination of being abnormally tired, distracted-as-usual and dissatisfied with the direction the intro was taking really ate up a lot of time. I've since come up with an idea I like a lot more and hope that I'll be able to finish it up soon. I was originally going to wait until I had finished it to bring up the potential switch because I wanted us to be totally done, but thinking about it now it makes more sense to give you guys the extra time to play around/think things over while I finish the intro.
3. Even if you guys do like this idea but just don't want to do it now, that's fine! We can consider moving to a different platform at any time; we don't need to rush. If OI could move all the profiles and necessary threads from ZB to IPB, we can certainly do the same thing. The reason I bring it up now, before we've actually opened the RP, is that while moving later is possible, it would be easier to move now while we don't have all the profiles and extra stuff to worry about transfering. It'd save us a lot of work to move sooner rather than later.
4. Related to points 2 and 3 above, the reason I wanted to bring this up now is because there'll be minimal work involved either way. If we decide to move, we just set up the forum, transfer the necessary threads, move the domain and get started. If we don't... we just get started. Simple no matter what the ultimate decision is.
All that out of the way, and just to summarize what I'm getting at, I'd like to consider us switching from Zetaboards to ProBoards. I've spent some time playing with ProBoards while stuck on the intro post and have compiled a list of all the important pros and cons. The lists are a little lengthy, so I've spoiler tagged them.
- The forum will still be free and still be on a well-known and robust platform—one that, in my observation, is doing a bit better at actually implementing user requests and other features at this time.
- I'm not sure how many other ProBoards forums you guys have spent time on or whether you've looked at their old admin panel, but while the front end of the forum worked well enough (and could be made to look very pretty and heavily customized), the ACP interface was pretty crappy. vBulletin may have made a million different options that looked confusing, but this had very few options in an ugly layout that wasn't terribly intuitive. ProBoards is now moving on to version 5 of their software, which is a complete rewrite that not only makes everything (especially the admin panel) much easier on the eyes by default but is also adding a ton of features that their old-school software didn't have when all the competitors had picked them up quite some time ago. It's a massive improvement and is looking very sharp and functional.
- As of v5, ProBoards either has built-in features or plugins/codes equal to or better than what ZB has or what we've added. By default it has HTML pages and customizable portal widgets, a built-in shoutbox that autorefreshes and allows guest shouts (though we should still be able to put the Chatango box on a page if we ultimately prefer that), custom profile fields that allow links, fully-implemented "who's online/who's been online" features, and more. It has a nice sidebar plugin that I was able to tweak so that it collapsed and remembered its state just like ours. I was also able to redo the code for our custom BBCode (sprites, admin edit, etc.) so that they'd work on PB. (Actually the way I did it will work fine on ZB too, and in fact may be slightly better than our current code, so I may switch us over to that no matter what.)
- Another feature included by default is a customizable news fader that displays at the top of the homepage, which would let us post links to the latest TA, share any quick announcements, be a nice place to mention swarms if we do something like that, etc..
- It has searchable post labels/tags we can define in the ACP. For example, we could use these to mark IRP threads, or maybe mark a question in the help forum as "resolved", or tag TA threads as being different from more general announcements, things like that.
- There's an optional WYSIWYG post editor for members who want to see their posts as they type rather than relying solely on BBCode. Both WYSIWYG and BBCode modes, as well as the quick-reply, include a post draft feature to help prevent members from losing long posts in progress.
- The default theme is mobile-friendly if people want to check in with their phones or tablets. There's also a ProBoards app for iOS and Android, though it's not free so any member who wanted to use it would need to pay 2.99 for it.
- The v5 plugin architecture works more like traditional forum/software plugins that you just have to install and configure rather than copying/pasting and editing JavaScript, though it does also support ZB-style JavaScript template mods for things that don't have plugins. And even though the software is new, there are still a respectable number of plugins available. I've already mentioned the sidebar plugin and and have also tested a spoiler plugin (which still needs some tweaking, I'll admit) and a plugin that adds BBCode buttons to the quick reply; there are also other cool things like an awards/achievements system. See the current lists of plugins, template changes and also useful tweaks for examples of what's available and what's customizable.
- Themes are installed in a similar way to plugins and are easier to customize without necessarily wading through a whole CSS file (which I personally prefer, haha, but it'd make things simpler for everyone else). There's a visual theme editor that can be played around with and everything, and even that is enough to tweak the default theme into something more interesting.
- One of my favorite additions to v5 is a "bookmarking" feature that works like the topic notifications on IPB, popping up a little bubble (or even email you) to let you know that someone has posted in your thread and thus making it trivial to tell as soon as a mod has updated you. It's much better than ZB's "subscriptions", which don't notify you of anything and there's no way to add that functionality without a code that's not quite the same thing (it's not optional, for example—it's on for all members whether they care about it or not—and it only tracks threads the user started and so is useless if you're doing IRP in the other player's thread or otherwise following a topic you didn't start) or maybe with a separate browser addon or something.
- There are some advanced social features like the ability to link to/tag a member in a post with a Twitter-like "@username", which can optionally give that user a notification (e.g. if I post "Hey chronicler, thanks for getting the daycare!" the post will link to his profile and the board will let him know I mentioned him). You can also choose to be notified if someone quoted one of your posts.
- v5 includes a post "liking" system that we can use kind of like OI's RePG or just have in general so people can show their appreciation for others' posts. It's fully-fledged and properly integrated with user accounts so it works better than the ZB options, though at least at this point it doesn't seem possible to restrict it to certain forums. Personally I'm not super concerned about that, but maybe we could ask for that option as a feature request. Likes, as with bookmarks and username tags, can optionally send users notifications as well. All notifications for these things and more can be configured—you can turn on email notifications, turn off in-forum bubble notifications and even turn off a notification type entirely, for example if you don't want it alerting you every time you've been quoted.
- You can also "follow" members you're interested in. For example, if I decide I really like DF's RP then I can follow him and see whenever he starts a new thread or posts in it, as well as possibly following other things he does around the board.
- There are also "status updates"; they can't be replied to like OI's but they're more visible than ZB's version, usually included right in the member's miniprofile.
- PMs are "conversation"-style, as on IPB, so they behave like private threads and can involve multiple participants talking at once. This could be useful for events where we have players team up as in OI's Rocket4Ever, and could conceivably be useful for quick private staff discussions or private communication for clans if needed.
- There's a detailed user reporting panel for admins and gmods (apparently not regular mods, though in our case that would just be RPG mods so it doesn't matter) that lets staff have a discussion about how to handle the report and the member. Staff can suggest courses of action, like whether they want to ban a member or disable their account. The report panel provides links for immediate action on the post (moving it, locking the thread, etc.), an overview of the reported post and whether there are any staff notes about the member, etc..
- For a bit of extra novelty there's a Flash-based avatar creator. This is mostly silly and I'm sure a lot of people will just upload the same avatars they would have anyway, but it's there and maybe people might want to make some cartoony version of their RP character, I dunno.
- v5 supports a "global login" with other ProBoards forums and accounts. If any of our affiliates are on ProBoards, for example, then it'll be easy for members who are on both Turquoise and that affiliate to link their accounts together (it wouldn't share their posts or anything, the forums are still entirely separate, but it might be nice to only have to login once).
- While I haven't investigated it myself yet, it looks like there's an "export posts and PMs" option for people who use the ProBoards global accounts. If I'm understanding that correctly, members will have that if they want backups of the posts they've made or conversations they've had, which is cool.
- v5 also has "badges" that can be given to other members, but these are separate from achievements/awards, they aren't customizable as far as I can tell and they cost money, so I doubt most of us will bother with them. Still, they're there if members want to mess around with them or show someone else their appreciation.
- It comes with better forum search, a slicker interface, a forum directory that actually works (ZB's is currently broken) so we can do a bit of advertising there... more up-to-date and shiny everything, really.
- Using a custom domain isn't free—it's $14/year on top of whatever we're paying for the domain itself. If we "convert" from Zetaboards we could get the first year free (along with three months of no ads), though.
- The v5 software is still in beta and will be until later this month. It appears to be functional and plenty of people have already converted their existing v4.5 forums for general use, but it will mean that there may occasionally be bugs while they work out the kinks. Personally I think it'll be worth it if everyone else agrees this software is superior to ZB, but it is something to keep in mind and that we'll have to tell the members about until everything is ironed out for the full release.
- Everyone who has already joined would have to re-register, of course, and none of the old posts would carry over (we'd still have this forum as an archive, though).
- The signature limit is hard-coded at 500 characters. At the very least there are the custom profile fields that people can put links to their profiles in, so as long as we make sure people put links there then they won't need to waste precious sig space on that, but it is still uncomfortably small.
- There are no built-in member blogs, although if we wanted to we could go back to the "blog forum" idea.
- It looks like custom usertitles are only admin-editable rather than user editable, although that's pretty minor and people can use the "status updates" to achieve a similar effect.
-Of course, we'll need to hunt for some new themes. The current list of v5 themes is here, though unfortunately there are only a few good ones at this point (I installed the only ones I was satisfied with on my test board). I will note that people have also designed/requested some really awesome themes for ProBoards in the past, though, and while I'd prefer ours remained relatively clean and simple (my problem with a lot of "fancy" forum themes is that they get so caught up in tiny detailed fonts and huge images that just reading the forum index gets annoying), but it should be more than possible to get something that looks really nice and can still actually be read by a normal person. I may try my hand at creating a few themes on my own down the road, even. (It also doesn't have a quick theme-changer dropdown by default, either, but there appears to be a plugin we could use to add something similar. )
- ProBoards doesn't have the "autotools" for topics and members that ZB has, e.g. setting up a tool that can automatically move banned members into the "banned" group. We'd have to do that manually if necessary, although it'd only be a few extra steps (and can done from the member's profile, in addition to banning them from there).
- It also doesn't have a moderation queue (i.e. a forum where posts don't appear until staff approves them). We don't currently need anything like that, but if for example we wanted to do E4 challenges the way OI does with the player and updater posting attacks in special threads the updater can't see until they're ready to make the battle post, we'd have to find another way.
- The v5 update has PB using slightly different BBCode syntax for some things (for example [nocode][a] tags for links instead of [url][/nocode]); it seems like most of the old syntax is automatically converted to the new so there shouldn't be much of a problem even if we keep using the old for a while, but we'd probably have to go through the RP sticky posts and tweak them a little to make sure they display correctly on the new forum.
- It's not self-hosted and it's not a publicly available piece of software, which means that while we don't have to handle maintenance/updates ourselves we're also not in control of our own data and backups and such. ProBoards is every bit as robust a service as Zetaboards is—I think it's actually been around a little longer than ZB's parent company, even—and they do keep backups and respond to forum restoration requests, but we are ultimately at their mercy if something bad happens. Granted this is also a problem with using ZetaBoards (and you'll both remember the issue OI's old ZB server had better than I will since I joined a few months after that happened), and my true ideal would be to get ourselves some proper self-hosting, but we're not in a position to do that or to ask members for money toward the hosting or software (not that I think we need to spend money on paid software anyway) at this point, so it's mostly moot.
As you can see, the list of pros drastically outweighs the list of cons, even without taking the really minor stuff into consideration! I can go on and on about this all I like, but ultimately you guys would be admins there as well and all my words mean nothing if you don't have a chance to test for yourselves. That's not a problem! I've created a test board and a set of test accounts that you guys can use to play around and see what you think of how everything works. Go to turquoisetest.proboards.com and login with the username "[REDACTED]" and password "[REDACTED]", and you'll have a selection of demo accounts you can choose to log into. The most important for you guys would obviously be the "Test Admin" account, since that will let you play around with all the administrative features, but you can test any of the major usergroups (gmod, mod, regular member, guest) as well. (I didn't include any of our more specific groups like VIPs or Community Mods because those are just matters of responsibilities and view permissions rather than a significantly different set of moderating options.) You can also easily switch between accounts by clicking the little people icon in the tiny menu in the bottom-right corner.
Feel free to do whatever you want with the admin accounts: post, add forums, delete forums, change settings, move members into different groups, pretty much anything. The only thing I ask of you is not to ban any accounts (though you can "disable" them, which is sort of like a temporary ban). I made that "Test Jerk" account because I wanted to experiment with banning options, but it turns out it's not possible to ban just one account on a global account—the entire global account, and all accounts on it (including the admin account!) will be banned from that forum instead. I mean, I dunno, since the admin account you're using is on the same account as all the others, maybe it won't let you ban yourself... but avoid the option just in case, or otherwise I'll have to come in and unban you so you can keep testing things. (The "Test Jerk" account does say that it's banned, but that's just a "Banned" usergroup I put it into; it's not actually banned and still has all the same access rights as a regular member.)
If you like, we can also ask the members (those who are still around, heh) whether they want to switch and let them test things out as well; if so we'd need to create an entirely new global account for them, new email and all, since giving them access to the demo account above will also let them play with admin options they don't need to see.
Take ProBoards for a test drive and see what you think, and let me know if there's an important new feature you like or existing ZB feature that's missing that I forgot about. As said above, if you guys don't like it then you don't like it and that's the end of it, and I don't want to do anything unless all of the staff is totally on board with it. I do think it's at least worth taking a solid look at, though.
