New software suggestion

[DaV8or]

Hi all,

As many have noticed, the software that runs this site has become very buggy as of late. It has always been buggy and problematic. However, we can't complain because we get what we pay for right? Costs us nothing to be here and Craig doesn't sell advertising.

I would like to propose all of us users pooling our money and buy Craig a copy of vBulletin. This is the software that drives 90+ percent of all the web forums that I have been involved with. It's full featured and seems to be pretty bug free. I think all the other popular aviation forums like AOPA, POA, etc use it. It costs about $200.

Anybody in?

[roundout]

I'm in

[roundout]

Well that isn't my name so even more reason to help out,

Steve  (fastbyk)

[fantom]

I'd like to hear what Craig suggests.

While we've had lots of suggestions for improvements, have we had any serious offers from software development folks on this site to assist Craig? Does he even have the time to manage them?

Ubiquitous vBulletin is not without it's challenge, recurring costs, and boundaries either. If that's what Craig needs, I'm in.

[bnicolette]

I would be willing to help out financially any way that Craig would like if something needs to be changed.  After all, I spend all my free time here now!   It would be cheaper than rent.

[Magnum]

I am in. Even if we have to raise more money to pay someone for the transfer / support. But Craig has to say what he wants, he is the founder of this great site.

Even with the bugs it is still better than the alternatives. I hate browsing through mailing lists...

[Awful_Charlie]

Before shelling out fo VBulletin, I would have thought it worth exploring a couple of other options.  One aviaiotnhj site I use a lot is vBulletin based (pprune.org) and it seems to have a lot of its own issues, despite being run by the owners of the software.  On the other hand, forums.flyer.co.uk run phpBB which is free, and looks after itself pretty well.  Pprune is a much larger community though, but I doubt even if every current and previous Mooney owner signed up that it would get that big.

Fully agree it is Craigs decision, and also that if he wants assistance for evaluation/implementation, he should be asking for that here too

Ben

[mooniac58]

I only run Windows based servers and have no knowledge in PHP development...I don't really want to run a canned software app that I won't be able to work on.

I think the biggest bug plaguing things right now is the user login system.  I hope to get some time soon to work on things.

[Shadrach]

Thanks Craig, for the record, I've only ever been able to post under my own name, but other's have managed to post as me...

[mooniac58]

Yeah, it seems specific to the autologin feature.  Not all users see it as it is kind of a random thing - a common problem in web development known as "session crossover".  In short, the web is stateless and there is no way to have the server know one page to the next who is who.  This is overcome by using cookies to assign an ID to each user and as you call the next page we know who you are by the cookie ID.  However, the person that wrote this forum system used a very unorthodox mehod of session tracking.  I am going to have to sever this from the code and completely re-write the login/session system to fix it.