New BBS

Post by **admin** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 11:42 pm

I've replaced the old and rather dated Discus BBS system with this new PHPBB system, which many of you will be familiar with. I've spent the better part of a day transferring the thousands of old messages into the new system, and I'm still working on getting the search index built.

Any comments or suggestions for the new system, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks everyone!

Darryl · Post by **Darryl** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 12:12 am

Glad to see the hard work on the site and keeping the Spirit alive. Nice work with the transformation to phpBB too.

Darryl

Post by **admin** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 1:44 pm

Thanks, it was a HUGE amount of work. There is no translator available for Discus -> PHPBB, so I ended up having to dissect the PHPBB database tables, and writing one myself. I also had to go through each thread in the old system by hand and classify them to fit into a topic in the new system.

Then the search tables had to be populated, and of course the existing utilities don't work with MS SQL (which is what this runs on), so I ended up having to write my own one of those as well. *sigh*

I've wanted to move to PHPBB for a while, I just didn't want to lose all the old Discus messages - almost 2,500 of them!

I'm hoping this new system helps stimulate more conversation and brings more people online. So tell your friends!