If the boards were php coded they would be easier to use. Is this something that may happen in the future? I know Paizo has a few things going on, and it wont happen overnight, but boards like this one are nice to use.
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Oh, I'd love if Paizo used boards similar to the Atomic Think Tank for Mutants & Masterminds, with private messages and advanced searches and all that jazz. [On the other hand, it's nice not to have to deal with posts that have the text 'Word!' or 'This!' and are followed by a sixty-four thousand word sigline with four flashing banners...]
But for now, I'm just thrilled that they don't use boards like the ones White Wolf used to use (and perhaps still do, haven't been in years), which delete any thread over a month old and catastrophically fail and delete *everything* every year, like clockwork...
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If the boards were php coded they would be easier to use. Is this something that may happen in the future? I know Paizo has a few things going on, and it wont happen overnight, but boards like this one are nice to use.
The boards are all internally coded because there is no 'out of the box' software that allows for the level of integration they needed between the messageboards, store, news, and other parts of the page. Also, they don't want custom avatars or signatures. That would lead to a greater need of policing the boards, and they don't want to do that
Senior Software Developer
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The captain is right. There are some other reasons we went the integrated route. For example, security. There have beeen known flaws in most messageboards implementation which lead to sites being hacked. This doesn't matter much if you're just hosting an area for discussion. Sure, you may lose all your threads and posts, and the front page may get replaced with some teenager's claim to the greatness of some obscure revolutionary sect, but that's about it. We do a lot of e-commerce and having our site compromised would be really terrible for a lot of people. There may be security flaws in our software, but the number of sites that use our software is exactly one, so it's much more profitable to explore flaws in code that has thousands of deployments around the world.
Please note that I'm extremely paranoid about these things, as I hope all programmers are who deal with thousands of people and their money. (So paranoid that I've spent the past few minutes trying to figure out if this post is a security risk.) I'm not saying that we rely on security through obscurity, I'm saying a bit of obscurity can't hurt.
On the flip side, we know that there are features that people want that we're missing. We're working on those. And probably some features that you didn't know you wanted just yet. My dream is for people to come to our site and say, "Hey, yeah, that's how a messageboard should work!"
Also, as a side note, the usability of messageboards isn't dependent on what language they're implemented in -- you can make terrible, feature-poor user interfaces in any development environment.... I should know. :-)
Gary, I just wanted to say Thank You for what you do over here. I for one appreciate all the hard work that you do.
Not that that has been said, let me say what else needs to be said...
~cracks the whip~ Get to work, slave!
~GRINS~
I don't care if you grin, this is still Me Time.
(Waitasec... what am I doing posting here during Me Time?!! Hang on, I gotta go look something up...)
~snarls~ Me time? What do you mean "Me Time"?!? You don't get any "Me Time", software slave! Now get to work!
~GRINS~ j/k!