Which Website/Forum Features do You Feel are Necessary?

Alerts, and the members/staff online list. It helps me keep some tabs on people and know who is on at what general times.

I would like to have a smaller shout-box though, it has brought us together but it is large.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try to make sure we can maintain everything we have here and add more as well.

My plan so far is as follows:

Migrate from Xenforo to phpbb3. (all users, threads, posts, groups, conversations, etc.)
We're going to be using a customized phpbb3 theme

Implement Joomla 3 as our homepage. This will allow us to have a more traditional website'ish homepage. We can talk in more detail about NNG, our divisions, the membership process etc.

Create user bridge/sync between Joomla and phpbb3 forums. This will allow news posts to be displayed on the homepage, but also to have a mirror'ed thread created in the forum, to bridge comments between the two.

Our site and forum will have a completely new look. Because we can't bring over the theme we're currently using. As much as I like it

But we will still maintain our branding, logo, and everything else that helps us have our signature look.

The whole process is going to require a lot of testing so I'll reach out for help.

That's where things are now

 

Testing? You know I love testing!

 

I'm still not sure why we should even migrate. I know there is a problem with the next batch of updates because of licensing, but can't we just stop updating and keep it how it is?

 

There are a variety of reasons some significant, some not. First is the lawsuit and the dissolution of Xenforo Ltd. We'll be without support and without professional security updates from their development staff. Last month we had a serious spambot attack and it caused issues. Other Xenforo communities faced the same issue. The truth of the matter here is that the longer this software sits out there without update, the more of a target it becomes for hackers/malware/viruses, etc.

I'd like to switch to phpbb3 because the community is more proactive being open source. It has much more history and is extremely feature rich compared to what Xenforo offered. Most of the functionality I struggled to get from it was community developed and really should have been baked right in from the get go.

Lastly, the longer we sit on Xenforo and continue to pile content into the db the more difficult it will be to migrate off in the future.

I've also been meaning for us to have a more traditional homepage, (currently not workable with Xenforo) so I'll be switching us over to the Joomla platform to aid there. The Joomla template and phpbb3 template will match, so we have unity between the site and forum.

The whole ordeal will keep us safer, more regularly updated and give us more freedom over dynamic content on the site.

 

Do you happen to have a date or a time window of when you see us moving?

 

I'm still working out the finer details. I will definitely communicate that out.

That will involve communications, locking the board for a day or two, having a recruitment freeze, followed by testing, before opening back up again.

 

I like the conversation thing - where you can have a private convo with multiple people involved. I don't know how special it is, but I like it.

I just wish that the email alerts would contain the content of the convo so I'd be able to easily catch up on my phone.

Oh - there's another - a mobile template would be really nice.

 

I agree with Nano, a mobile template would be a good thing to have. Half the time I'm using my phone on here.