Evening all,
As part of a long overdue refresh of this place I intend to introduce a new piece of forum software to replace phpBB. Feel free to suggest other (free!) options in this thread if you want but the one I've got my eye on at the moment is Discourse....

...the self hosted one, not the one costing $100/month!

If we were to go ahead with this I should be able to import most of the content from here over to there and we wouldn't lose too much (which may be a good or bad thing, I dunno) - but I need to know there's an appetite for it as I'll need to set up a test server for a month or two to give people a chance to try it out and then, if we like it, the server will be made permanent. I've just won a chunk of credit at my hosting firm so I'm happy to try this for now.

If you're interested in helping test this out - or you have any other suggestions for phpBB replacements (preferably with easy Laravel integration) then post in here. If there's enough interest I'll spin a server up and we'll give it a go

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Mike Price - @mikkyx

Mike, you lost me at phpBB!! Happy to follow you experts wherever you take us.

Mikky, I'm also happy for you to try out new software. If it's got Laravel integration it must be OK (actually I have no idea what this is...).

Happy to be tester

I'll be a tester and give it a whirl.

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http://buytickets.at/dfcsg

Just be mindful of the new General Data Protection Regulations which are coming at end of May 2018. Plenty of T&c's, users consent, usual encryption and info security sweeping for malware etc. Ask testers to try it on a variety of OS and platforms. Not everyone keeps up to date with patches or hardware, so Keep It Simple, low data usage and even 3G. Thanks for your efforts

I am not sure how any Data Controller can comply fully with the new regulations.

I have been involved both in a business and a voluntary sports club for children and neither organisation are able to fully comply with this dogs dinner of regulations

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If it ain't broke, don't fix it !!

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Mr Singh said this " I'm not expecting to get back any of the money I've already put in, I'm prepared to write it off for the future of the club. I'm not hanging in to make any kind of financial gain in the short or long term - if someone was prepared to come in and take the club off my hands, I'd be more than willing to discuss it"

Tamworth matchday programme 26 Nov 2011

Which is probably exactly how they want it so that they can go around handing gigantic fines to everyone who can't possibly comply with everything.

Too cynical?

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Mike Price - @mikkyx

phpBB ain't broke, it's just old. I should at least try to upgrade it to 3.2 if I end up keeping it but I'm worried about the integration with the rest of the site.

There's a demo forum here if you fancy a look at what Discourse might look / work like: https://try.discourse.org/

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Mike Price - @mikkyx

As long as we don't lose such golden discussions as:

"has anybody seen the moon"
and
"Merlin vs Andy Park"

then do what you must...

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No, too right. It is v complicated but tries to protect privacy so if this can be designed into the upgrade, would be useful. Some help on http://www.ico.org.uk site.

Do any other fans forums use it? I’ve been on a few different ones over the years and our present one is one of the best

I've had a look. I prefer how this one looks, it has a functional simplicity about it - although an upgrade may be in order.

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Mr Singh said this " I'm not expecting to get back any of the money I've already put in, I'm prepared to write it off for the future of the club. I'm not hanging in to make any kind of financial gain in the short or long term - if someone was prepared to come in and take the club off my hands, I'd be more than willing to discuss it"

Tamworth matchday programme 26 Nov 2011

Thanks for the replies everyone - having looked into setting up a Discourse for something else I've decided against going ahead with this for now, but I'll continue exploring options.

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Mike Price - @mikkyx