So if everything looks a little different right now, that's because the forum system has just been migrated to ElkArte! It's basically a modern version of the SMF forum system that is actually properly maintained and updated. This was necessary as old SMF was starting to show its age and breaking on a standard, updated server configuration.

ElkArte also has much improved features like better spam management, which is an absolute must for this place as you might know.

I will be taking advantage of the move to try to improve the forums in a few other ways too.

If you find any bugs, issues, or have suggestions, please let me know!

Todo list:

✔ Fix some things (like broken images, avatars and attachments)
✔ Configure anti-spam and re-enable forum registration
✔ Change favicon
✔ Install some useful plugins (suggestions are welcome: emoji, ReCAPTCHA
✔ Add the Spherical logo

- Find a solution for syntax highlighting
- Find and edit an appropriate new theme

Well the migrated forum seems to work and it looks alright good work.


Though I'm not sure if the green suits Sphere.

This is just the default theme. Picking or making another team will come later, but I have more important things on my plate right now unfortunately.

You can help by looking here and checking out what themes might be good. I'm especially looking for ones that look good on phones too (responsive).

I kind of like this default theme, but I guess it's not very Sphere-y  and OH NO PIGGGGGG *MUNCH*

Hm, that emoji plugin would be nice to have.  Regarding issues: It seems to be glitchy on mobile; sometimes I have to tap things twice to get them to respond, which is kind of annoying.  And the posting page gets too wide once you activate the keyboard, at least on iOS.  See screenshot.

I like it! Great to see this place up and running still

Not bad, nice layout. I definitely see the similarities to SMF. What version of SMF were you running prior? Last I knew, they were regularly updating the SMF 2.x line.

It's quite nice! Just gotta get that theme updated. Thanks for your hard work!

Oh, as a reminder, at some point we need syntax highlighting back, for JS at the very least.

Nice to see some activity! (Seems like sending this as an announcement helped... )

I kind of like this default theme, but I guess it's not very Sphere-y  and OH NO PIGGGGGG *MUNCH*

Hm, that emoji plugin would be nice to have.  Regarding issues: It seems to be glitchy on mobile; sometimes I have to tap things twice to get them to respond, which is kind of annoying.  And the posting page gets too wide once you activate the keyboard, at least on iOS.  See screenshot.

Thanks for the reports! I'm sure most of that will resolve itself once a different theme is picked. As for the emoji plugin, I had some issues before but I think I know what was wrong before, and also one of the important bugs was fixed. Will add soonish.

Not bad, nice layout. I definitely see the similarities to SMF. What version of SMF were you running prior? Last I knew, they were regularly updating the SMF 2.x line.

Thanks! We were running 2.0.14 (after a much due upgrade) but the Big Issue is that it didn't work on PHP 7 without workarounds due to them never changing the database code to use mysqli, instead using the old deprecated mysql module which stopped being supported in modern PHP. There were more issues like mods and plugins not really functioning well and not really having a lot of options.

ElkArte is basically a fork I believe, but I have some more trust in the code base being kept up to date. All in all it seems to do a lot of things better in general. For one, I re-enabled account creation and no spambots seem to have invaded us yet.

Oh, as a reminder, at some point we need syntax highlighting back, for JS at the very least.

Agreed, but there seems to be no plugin for this. I think N E O made his own plugin at the time, or whatever is available for SMF doesn't exist for ElkArte. I'm gonna have to look around for solutions.

Is there a way to disable hyphenation on mobile?  I don't know who thought that was a good idea, it makes text harder to read, not easier.

This theme looks kind of Sphere-y: 
http://themes.elkarte.net/mimic/Frozen-Stars.html

Hmmm, it seems to be some sort of modification on top of the green default theme instead of a full theme on its own, so it wouldn't really solve any of the current theme/responsiveness issues. It does look like a good style to follow though.

Edit: for now, I've changed themes to StormCloud, just to get rid of the default look at least. Edit 2: reverted, as the theme had a bug where read forums were indistinguishable from unread ones. (Sigh) You can always manually set the theme, but I'm going to have to put some more effort into this in the weekend, it seems.

Something is apparently wrong with the forum registration captcha, trying to fix that now.

Update: I'm trying to implement a ReCAPCTHA plugin, but it doesn't work properly so I've posted an issue report on Github about it.

Place looks modern, I like it :p