I think it’s about time for me to set the records straight. I haven’t really, till a couple of days ago made up my mind about wether phpBB was actually worth the two damn mega-bytes it takes up to work and the 70 Kilo-bytes for the database. Given that, you gotta know I made up my mind to not!

It all started with my first step, picking out a theme for phpBB. Supposedly, they’ve got a huge cooked up themes database. I was goin in with a big heart, assuming they’ve got some kind of super-dilicious themes that will go around with my teen-oriented forum. Man was I dreaming! I’m sorry to say this, but the folks over there are completely missing the point. We, as forum owners, aren’t looking for 20 or so subSilver(the default theme) variations. Yeah! Sure, I’m looking for a white and black suB, A dark blue one, a light blue one, a grey one, a green one, damn! I hate to sound like an eminem fan but that sounds so gay! :P … Other than that, the themes mostly suck and most of them were probably made to be some sort of link bait for another forum… I can’t say I don’t think any of the themes look good, I surely do like some, but they just didn’t fit into my criteria.

I gave up and just went off with some hi-tech theme, totaly off-theme by the way. When I was done with that, I went out to look for some mods to style up my forum a bit, default only really bored my ass off… I started off looking for some search engine optimization mods. I, without any MODs, went and took off the SIDs from the URLs. Later, through my search, I came across pretty much a couple of the same MODs rewritten in every way you can imagine, a bit creative if you asked me… I then, came across, the supposedly, best SEO MOD in the phpBB game, Able2Know. Yet again, it didn’t seem professional at all. It literally ate up half of the forum’s capability, and uglifying the whole look. When I was done with finding some MODs, I had this picture:
“phpBB MODs are so damn unethical, meaning that they are based on no structure and it has quite an ugly installing method…”…

Putting all that aside, I was usually used to the quite powerfull featured SMF with some customizations of mine. When I started to test the forum a bit, that was like the last straw for me… Each time I wanted to delete anything, I had, just had to, go into the moderating panel, god forbid they just put it as an extra argument in the viewtopic.php! Later then, I figured out modding won’t be easy, I needed quite some moderators. So, I went in into the admin panel, expecting to find some X Moderators panel to choose some moderators and super moderators for that matter. And, in only a few hours :D , not much for a phpBB forum :p, happened to come across with a small hidden feature that will let me choose a moderator for each forum, alone. Even more surprisingly, I could only change one forum moderator at a time, although there are selection boxes for each… :) Plain Pain :) …

*Wondering where my SMF is :( * :D . Guess that was the last straw. I had it. So I will, some time, take down the phpBB and possibly either use a VBulletin or an SMF…

By the way, I’m talking about phpBB2. phpBB3 is in BETA2 when I was writing this and I’m surely gonna try out phpBB3 and give you a shout! I do appreciate what the folks at phpBB do, and do know that other bulletin boards do get more financial support, but I just think they can do better ;) .

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