What was the time when things were the best on MFGG?

personally I liked the pirated vbulliten

It depends on how you measure things. MyBB is by far the best forum software. IPB was the most active period for the community, while the least dramatic period (2011-2016) happened during the second phpBB era.

This has nothing to do with fangame development, so I moved it to General Chat. Please put more consideration into where threads belong before you post them and slow it down on thread creation in general. Thanks.

MyBB is the best technically speaking so that's what I'm voting.

(06-20-2018, 07:39 PM)Pedigree Wrote: This has nothing to do with fangame development, so I moved it to General Chat. Please put more consideration into where threads belong before you post them and slow it down on thread creation in general. Thanks.

MyBB is the best technically speaking so that's what I'm voting.

Like how long should I slow it down on?

Every era of the board has had its perks. Ezbread was great because we were all fresh faces and people weren't as jerky on the internet back then. Seemingly everyone already had an account and joining the board was easy, which meant loads of new, friendly faces. The Vbulletin was great except it was an illegal copy and I didn't know about that kind of stuff back then as a friend/massive a**h*** was hosting the board at the time. The Invision is where MFGG really hit its stride and the software was perfect for that era, hugely prosperous in terms of both fangames and members, for better or worse. The PHPBB feels like a bit of a dull time but was fun to set up, and now the MYBB iteration feels fresh and new again while being a powerful little beast with lots of versatility.

Anyway since I can't resist talking about forums at any opportunity I'll give a more serious answer.

I definitely think the vBulliten is the most hilarious, LOL. It didn't look too bad either. It apparently only lasted a few months? but I definitely remember it. It didn't look too much different than the IPB board, sucks to put all that work into making a board look nice for it to be stolen LOL

IPB was definitely the best forum MFGG had and honestly I think it's one of MFGG's great mistakes moving out of it. Yes IPB 1.3 wasn't going to get any support moving forward and yes it was starting to show its age but we've kept the same main site the entire time since then and both of those problems apply to it as well. Unlike the main site though, IPB 1.3 has had a small community out to keep it up and running for years; I'm not sure if it's still around today, but Jcink Forum Hosting shows that at the very least if you're dedicated enough you can keep patching it and update it as needed. We've never really gotten any major advantages out of using phpBB or MyBB unfortunately. I think alerts is the biggest thing and they're not even that significant. I wouldn't start up an IPB 1.3 board these days but incrementally building off of it as needed wouldn't have been a bad strategy.

phpBB probably had the best developed themes though; a ton of work was put into making it a comfortable leap from the classic IPB layout and it really shone through as one of the more usable phpBB boards out there (and this extended to Minus World 1 too). The MyBB ones are O.K. but MyBB starts out with a really awful and dated default theme and I don't think we've really transcended it much.

I'm just thinking in terms of software here. As far as eras of the community goes, MFGG has always been pretty O.K., I can't think of any major peaks or valleys that stand out for me.

I was partial to the vBulletin board since I joined the community just as that came into use. I think it used a gamecube theme?

I liked the invision board a lot. I invested a lot of time in the ikonboard and later invision communities back then, and did a fair amount of modding on ours. I always thought it did a good job with the essentials of forum presentation and features. Honestly I don't remember what the big push was to get off it. I'm not sure it was worth it. Invision was the best all around IMO, in terms of software and community.

I put a good bit of work into the phpBB early to try and re-theme it like invision, so kinda happy that got called out. phpBB has always been kind of awkward. If you accept that we had to switch software, I think it was the right choice at the time. phpBB had turned around a major new version and had a pretty bright looking future at that point. In reality it just stagnated instead.

I don't have much to say about myBB. I've been out of the forum business for a while. It seems fine?

@Mario @Retriever II There were a few reasons why the 2009 MFGG staff wanted to move away from the IPB forums:

• Security holes: Since IPB 1.3 was six years old and wasn't being supported anymore, there were some hard-to-patch security holes.
  
• Glitches: The IPB MFGG suffered from a variety of problems, from chronic irritations to acute failures (like the software inexplicably deleting Mrs. Aforcer's account).
  
• Desire for a fresh start: The 2009 MFGG staff was growing tired of some bad attitudes coming from certain parts of the community (although this was partially a product of having a very large and active community - a large barrel will always have some bad apples). They proposed several changes to fix these problems and felt that it would be easier to implement them in a new board.
  
• New features: phpBB offered some features that IPB didn't (although it also lost a few features). One of the biggies was (partial) forum-mainsite integration.
  

"Awkward" is a good way to describe phpBB - it had a clunky interface, and the software never quite reached its full potential. A strong case could be made that MFGG would've been better off had we stuck with IPB for a while longer, but hindsight is 20/20.

I don't remember a specific security threat. It was old and unmaintained, but we did our own security patching based on what vulnerabilities were published. Not sure about the irritations/glitches part.

I think it mostly had to do with community split. I was obviously there at the time and part of the decision making process, but it's been almost a decade (!!!!!) so the details are really fuzzy.

@Retriever II Yeah. I'm not aware of any specific weaknesses, although there probably were some that hadn't been patched. That said, any forum or content management system is going to have some vulnerabilities. The staff at the time felt that phpBB would have fewer vulnerabilities than IPB, but I'm not sure if it made much of a difference.

I don't remember all of the arguments presented for or against moving to phpBB - it's been a while, I wasn't staff then, and I never have read through all of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of posts discussing the move.

(06-23-2018, 06:27 PM)Retriever II Wrote: I don't have much to say about myBB. I've been out of the forum business for a while. It seems fine?

That's basically how I feel about MyBB. It's not really anything special, it's just fine. Forum software seems to not have really made much progress in the past 10 years or so. There's minor improvements here and there but nothing too great is out there.

It's really dumb that forum software hasn't made any progress in possibly the most important 10 years in web development history. Almost all MyBB themes are mobile-unfriendly, which is a travesty. And menus are still complicated as hell to navigate. Forum software is all trash right now; the best we have is Discourse lol.

But we're all used to forums, so MyBB is fine for us right now I suppose. Hopefully LumaSMS will greatly improve upon it, though.

I despise Discourse.

I love the work done on Kira Game Forum 2 by Clar; she really put a lot of love into it. Kira Game Forum 1 had a certain charm to its very basic layout, but nothing can stand to the love put into a forum. Speaking of love, Crab Radish might be my favourite due to the fact that it had all of the custom assets created just to be overtaken by RPers who had nothing to do with the crew of the forum. F32X was too much trying to be edgy Pixeltendo and was completely unmemorable. Minus World 1's primary theme and alligators was great; it's too bad we lost the archive; however, Minus World 2 is the best forum-based game in existence and has an ever evolving meta that now includes a separate site and discord. It's growth as of late has been forum driven via Killing game - something that calls back to the first real split from MFGG.

(06-28-2018, 03:17 PM)GothGirlGangDrei Wrote: I love the work done on Kira Game Forum 2 by Clar; she really put a lot of love into it. Kira Game Forum 1 had a certain charm to its very basic layout, but nothing can stand to the love put into a forum. Speaking of love, Crab Radish might be my favourite due to the fact that it had all of the custom assets created just to be overtaken by RPers who had nothing to do with the crew of the forum. F32X was too much trying to be edgy Pixeltendo and was completely unmemorable. Minus World 1's primary theme and alligators was great; it's too bad we lost the archive; however, Minus World 2 is the best forum-based game in existence and has an ever evolving meta that now includes a separate site and discord. It's growth as of late has been forum driven via Killing game - something that calls back to the first real split from MFGG.

Great post. SMF (what kira game 2 and forum32x run/ran) isn't too bad of a software on its own, harder to theme than MyBB though. ZFGC actually had a few staff members become developers of it. afaik it's been pretty stagnant over the years too. Just as MyBB has been hyping version 2.0 forever (they just recently announced it's indefinitely on hold LOL), SMF has been waiting on 2.1 for just about the same amount of time. I think it might have a more robust plugin system than MyBB though? idk haven't ran it myself in years.

I think all of those boards had their own unique charm though, f32x was probably my favorite aside from when draco and turboman used it to flirt with each other LOL.