Weird things happening with the forum | Page 87 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Look everyone, I know the forum feels like it’s being held together with a couple of bits of string and some yellowing sticky tape. I’m doing what I can to put things right, but it needs quite a lot of attention to really get to the bottom of the problems.

As @Ahhh Girl said, I’m working on a full redesign and overhaul of the forum. I’m hopeful that it’ll fix some of the current issues, but probably not all.

I think the current forum software probably isn’t worth keeping in the long-term, but finding an alternative is hard because a) it involves a potentially complicated migration of posts, threads, sections, images and so on, and b) it will probably lead to different or reduced functionality. I want to shop around and get it right because you all deserve it. Realistically, though, it’s something I probably won’t be able to do fully until I leave my job in December. In the meantime I’ll patch things where I can, so please 

Starr Shine? said
Do you plan on changing Simple Press completely?  

I would like to. I’ve been with them since 2008. Back then it was (as the name suggests) quite a simple way to integrate a forum to a website. Since then they’ve added a ton of features and options, and around 2012 they started charging for support. I don’t have a problem with that – it’s nice to have more functionality, and everyone deserves to make a living. But they’ve moved from what was a fairly open dev/support community into a proprietary one, and with that came a lot of issues.

Often when I have paid for a few months’ support I’ve found it lacking – two of the three support staff often don’t understand the precise issues you have, because they skim through and half-read the comments, and they have a tendency to brush you off with generic solutions. That’s not so good when you’re paying for support, so I stopped. Also, I kind of resent having to pay just to report a bug which they introduced. I can buy a month’s support, which I may do when I have a bit of time to sort everything out, but even then there’s no guarantee things will be fixed. Quite often they just tell you to disable all other plugins and revert to a standard theme, which is difficult when you’re on a live production site with lots of visitors. Then they’ll tell you it might be your hosting, but most hosts don’t want to get involved in a third-party bit of forum software, because it’s not something they support. It’s a bit of a bind.

Right now the PMs and article linking seem to have stopped working (I know PMs have always been patchy for many). It’s pretty critical for me that these are working as intended. I worry that more and more things will fail over time.

That’s a bit of a long moan. The better solution would be to switch to an open-source forum with an active dev community. They’re out there, but the migration puts me off as outlined upthread. Also, I know from experience how unpopular any changes are. Another big WordPress forum plugin is called BBPress – it was made by the same people who made WP, so it’s free and here to stay, but it looks frankly awful.

If I can fix everything I will, but I’ll have to choose the best solution. I have a dev server I can use to test any migrations before attempting it here (I actually tried to port everything over to a BBPress installation once before and it failed, so I shelved that plan, but I might revisit now I’m on a different web host).

TL;DR I’d like to, yes, if I can set up a new and reliable forum with structure and functions similar to this one.