Palimpsest is the (mainly) books discussion site I founded with my friend Al Kitching a couple of years ago.
Essentially a phpBB forum, it now has around 30 regular members and over 15,000 posts. We don’t delete any, the forum acting as a repository for reviews and thoughts on books and things.
It costs a fair bit to run, however, and so we have decided to put into place a donation scheme, where members can contribute towards the running costs of the site. A recommendation of £5 per year was made. Fortunately, this has ben met with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it might mean that more can be done with the site.
One of the things I am interested in doing is converting the site to a new forum system. The one I am looking at is VBulletin – a paid service which costs $80 a year, which in real money is about £45-50. This includes all upgrades, of course. Part of the reason for this is that due to the popularity of phpBB, all sorts of ne’er-do-wells are targetting these sites and either spamming them or clogging up the sessions on the database so that no-one else can access the site. Using a more robust system, like VBulletin will mean that these problems will be no more.
What I have to do, and do right, will be importing the phpBB stuff into the new forum. I think people will be generally pretty upset if any of the previous posts got lost.
I also need to have a clear out of the server. There’s piles of crap in there which probably really doesn’t need to be.
Gah. So much to do, so little time…
Ah yes, so that’s what it’s called, VBulletin. It’s everywhere, and it’s good too.
Hi yjmli. Yes, it’s a good system and should mean that the site is more usable and stable in the future. PhpBB is a bit of a victim of its own success in that there seem to be all sorts of nasties out there which seem intent on buggering it up.