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Hey Roifield, I’ve been a listener for a long time and I’d really like this forum to work and be popular. Right now, it’s got some flaws that make it nearly unusable, especially on a mobile device.
1. That annoying speak pipe button floats around and blocks the screen
2. If you aren’t logged in, it’s not obvious how to post or reply. Having the login button on the site menu is non standard.
3. You’ve got to get Tapatalk going so people on mobile devices can easily use the forum. It’s never worked. The Mustardland forum is also unusable on mobile because the style sheet is poorly designed and it doesn’t line break or format well. With Tapatalk this forum would be far more readable and attractive.
3. The Rusian hacker thing scares people, no one is going to sign up while you are owned by Russian hackers.
It would be a big change, but I would suggest you ditch the current forum software and use the same one as this site:
http://coffeeforums.co.uk/forum.php
That’s pretty standard and I think it’s free. It’s used by several forums I am on and it’s secure enough that I don’t often see spam.
Sorry to sound overly harsh, but I like the show and want it to be better.
I have to agree, I’m afraid. While WordPress is good at some things, I have yet to see a WordPress based forum that is easy to use (desktop and mobile) and hacker-proof (without imposing horrible limits of one kind or another).
Other than increasing usability and security, the other advantage of implementing one forum is that the same piece of software can be used for all the different productions, allowing cross-promotion of the RB Productions brand. Dedicated forum software also allows very fine-grained control of users, posts and permits moderation by specified people on specified areas.
The Coffee Forums linked above are powered by vBulletin and their hosted plans run from USD15 to USD60 per month. This has the advantage of being pretty much plug-and-play, but the disadvantage that your (and your users’) data is held on somebody elses machine under somebody else’s control. Miss a payment and… bang… all the data has gone. If they put their prices up, you have to start again somewhere else.
There are open source forums available which do give you the control, but need to be hosted somewhere (at a cost, usually, but if you want to talk about this, we may be able to come to a deal!!!). The downside of implementing your own software is that it is necessarily complicated and requires some skill, experience and knowledge to set it up and manage it properly.
The page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software gives a good comparison of the various systems available.
Nicholas.
Hi both, this is priority for me. Our techie will try to fix the issue while staying with the current forum as we have ultimate member plugged into it and the rest of the website at the moment. I aim to get get this fixed and other issues fixed in the next 2 weeks. If he cant stay with the current site I’ll install another forum as you suggest.
Thanks for the reply Roifield, and also Nicholas for the post that was way more technically accurate. I’m going to keep my eye on what happens here.
We’ve made some progress but I don’t think it’s working quite yet. I can find the forum on Tapatalk and browse the posts, which I could never do before. The problem now is that you can’t log in. If you can’t log in, you can’t post.
I’ve tested this a bunch of times by verifying that my username and password works on the web site, then trying to log in using Tapatalk. No luck. I did just change my password, so maybe that takes a while to get all the way to Tapatalk. I’ll try later as well.
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