Peterborough Board Gamers

[Chris__M]

As some of you will know, there has been very little obvious development on the site over the last year.

This is largely because we are still on an fairly aged version of phpBB - v2. I had half developed a replacement site using the latest phpBB3 release, before realising that our calendar functionality was not supported by phpBB3; furthermore the guy that developed the calendar I based my code on is no longer developing for the community. I decided to wait until a new calender mod appeared, and when it hadn't after 3 months, the project went on the back burner.

The good news is that someone has now come up with a usable calender mod for phpBB3 - not exactly what we need, but close enough for me to tweak it.

Advantages we will gain:

Moving to phpBB3:

• Much greater security - the old v2 has been targetted by a number of hackers, fortunately I have stayed one step ahead of them up to now.
  
• Greatly improved anti-spam support.
  
• Ability to place new users on a moderation queue (i.e. I have to approve their posts), which means I can be more relaxed about whether a new user is genuine or not - I will soon find out, and you guys won't see anything out of order.
  
• Improved private mailing, with registered users allowed to send multiple recipient mails.
  
• Ability for registered users to upload files to posts (i.e. pdfs of rules etc)
  
• Potential for some RSS functionality (subject to board security)

New Calendar:

• Better integration to the forums
  
• Ability to set up repeat events
  
• Attendee lists - where people can simply click a button and their name is added to the list of attendees at the top of the message (either with or without posting a message.

In addition to the above, the appearance is going to change. In my original plans, I was trying to make the current layout work with phpBB3, but it actually meant too many compromises. However, I'm hoping you will like the new look.

I am going to be working on this over Christmas, and when I get to a point that I am happy with, I will invite people onto my development site to take a look and comment, before going live.

Note I will be making some posts in the Helpdesk forum, as I think of things to ask folks about the new design.
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Chris

[Chris__M]

[Tom]

Easy money, tell them about the famous Gypsy from Peterborough who loved gaming and made a vast fortune but had no-one to pass it on to. For a small admin fee you can give them access to the funds

[Chris__M]

Due to me being busier than expected over Christmas, I didn't do quite as much work on the v3 code as I had planned. Despite this, the new code is now almost ready to let people loose on it.

However, before putting it up, I am moving the existing code over to my new server, as it will make the code change easier to manage.

I have just made the DNS change to move www.poshgames.org.uk to the new IP address - this change should propagate over the next day or so. As both servers are currently running identical code, and accessing the same mySQL database, it shouldn't make any difference to all of you, and you may not even notice when it flips to the new server. You can carry on using the website, without any problems.

Once I am happy that the DNS has propagated world-wide, I can then proceed with the next step.
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Chris