Post by Vio on Sept 10, 2023 12:56:49 GMT -5
Hey, everyone! We’re back again for a fresh poll, this time to determine the hosting site we’ll be using as we restructure and refresh the site! After some foraging by our local Fox, there are only a couple of alternatives in the forms of Jcink and Forumotion that we feel are accessible enough. With such massive changes coming to the site, now is as good a time as any to make the potential move!
The main reason we’re presenting this as a poll is to get some feedback from the community. Cast your vote for the preferred option and, if you have any personal experience with any of the presented options, please feel free to comment about the positives and negatives of the platform! We’ve also made test sites to mess around with and will be allowing members (who want to give the basics a test drive) to access them.
First, let’s address the options:
ProBoards
While ProBoards has served us for many, many years—well over a decade—it’s come to our attention that the hosting service they provide is now effectively on life support. An inability to receive effective support from their support forum and an apparently indefinite postponement of Version 6 has tipped us off to this.
Now, it isn’t a bad platform by any stretch of the imagination (even if there’s been a few questionable “bug fixes” in the past) and it’s served us well in the time we’ve been using it, but for site security purposes, the staff body has had to look into alternative options where support is more accessible if things start to go wrong. That said, we’re still keeping this option on the table. It is, after all, the devil we know.
Jcink
With a similar look and feel to ProBoards, Jcink provides a suite of new features and support previously unseen in ProBoards. Custom emojis, database backups, in-depth skin creation, custom BBCodes, and much, much more is available to us for customizing the board. Where Jcink falters is its lack of plugins. While ProBoards has an expansive library of plugins, Jcink only has custom BBcodes, which requires a certain knowledge of coding to implement, and the same goes for skins and many other features.
While Jcink has more depth, it lacks the ease of use compared to ProBoards—at least with regards to these coding features. There are likely many skin and custom BBCode libraries for us to pull from. The overall feel from the user’s side will be much the same as ProBoards.
Forumotion
With an extremely more modern look and feel, Forumotion offers a lot of new tools for posting, including headers, vertical scrolling, horizontal scrolling, line breaks, etc. It changes the posting template into a more modern tool, similar to what you might expect from Google Docs or a similar program. Instead of plugins or custom BBCode, Forumotion offers Widgets, which are little modules that can be installed in the layout of the board.
Ultimately, all of these options have something different to offer from each other. We want you all to make an educated decision, so feel free to create test accounts on these two test boards that we have created and try and see which one feels better to you. Would you like Forumotion (test site), Jcink (test site), or ProBoards? The choice is yours.
This poll will be up for the rest of the month to give people time to experiment (if desired) before they give any feedback.
