Eagleworld.net

The homepage of EagleRock
Archive for June 2010

The EGB Forums are Live!

2010-06-20

Well, after plenty of tons of configuration and testing, I'm proud to announce that the EGB forums are now ready to rock! You can get to them here: http://egb.eagleworld.net. Feel free to log in and create an account. Note that I might need to cross-reference your request, but you should be activated within a day.

I hope these forums are more usable and enjoyable for the members. As always, PMs, IMs, or whatever are welcome and I'll be willing to help out however I can!

EGB Forums are coming to Delorean!

2010-06-10

Well, anyone that's been part of the EGB for any period of time should know by now that I am not a big fan of the current EGB Forums, which are currently hosted at the Invision Power Boards site (Link). The forum management is lackluster in my opinion, and our forums have been hacked into multiple times in the past. As such, there's little I really can do to prevent these hacks, since I don't really have control over the boards that I would like to have.

The other major complaint I have is that I am basically at the whim of Invision to pray and hope that our accumulated information will remain available day-to-day. I have no way of backing up the forum data, and if I want to export the data to a tangible archive, Invision charges for that. Not very good for someone like me that hates the concept of "cloud computing."

So, I've taken it upon myself to resurrect the older style of the EGB Forums, which were originally hosted at another free forum site using PHPBB2. Instead of finding another site, however, I'm hosting it here at home. This way, I'll have full control over the forum and the underlying OS. It'll make my life much easier dealing with any riff-raff.

Security aside, I find PHPBB a much nicer BBS to use. It's ultimately more powerful and (at least in my opinion) more flexible and easier to configure. I can get granular with user access and forum configuration, plus it's easy to modify and skin. While the forum theme I wanted (SubBlack) is not available for PHPBB3 yet (it was originally a PHPBB2 theme), I've chosen a nice alternative until SubBlack is available.

I hope to have the forum completely configured by the end of June, ready for users to register and start posting. I will also have regular backups of all of our posts. Even if Delorean explodes, I'll be able to restore the form data and configs to one of my (multiple) backup servers to keep the forums alive. So, there will not be much redundancy lost by moving away from Invasion.

If you're interested in checking out the forums, head over to http://egb.eagleworld.net and take a look. Registering an account requires Administrator activation, and I don't plan on letting anyone on the forum until it's complete enough for testing. If you just can't wait, though, hit me up on IM or send me a PM on Newgrounds and I'll reconsider. :-)