These are my links for December 17th through December 22nd:

• A Physicist Solves the City –
• JettaMKV.com • Forums –
• A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist –
• The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast –
• Body Browser – Google Labs –

Now that the forums are at another lull, since most of us kinda dropped out of Urban Dead, I have been trying to decide what to do about the forum software.

PHPBB2 was a good product and was the top of the line free foum software for many years, but:

• the control panel has always left much to be desired
• mods are pretty difficult to accomplish and have to be redone at almost every update
• spamming is easily accomplished and the registration hurdles do virtually nothing to keep spammers out

Of course, I looked for free versions of forums. I had a friend try punBB, and while it is elegant, it is a little more simplistic than I’d like. I also checked out MyTopix and Phorum, but ended up falling for Simple Machines Forum.

It is very robust, has a pretty good converter, and is easy to update and modify. Best thing is that users are very easy to monitor and moderate.

The converter looked great but it failed in a few areas. Smilies didn’t get converted, and some people’s signatures and images had the first letter of the URL stripped off, making them just show the text of the link.

Otherwise, it seems to be working well. I’ll be tweaking it the next few days, and I already have a dark purple theme that I’m eyeing. But for now, for those that still peruse occasionally, just try it out and let me know if you see anything that isn’t working well.

The link to the forums is the same. But, I still have the old forums languishing around, so if there’s something that didn’t get ported over that you want or need, I can dig it up for ya.

Cheers!

The forums are screwed up thanks to a SQL error that I generated. Unfortunately I can’t fix it until I get home, as my work firewall doesn’t allow telnet or FTP.

It will be fixed by tonight though.