Hey, @Francis, I just joined a forum for the SciADV multimedia series, and it’s like everything I could have ever wanted to experience from digibutter, just themed around SciADV instead of SPM. Don’t get me wrong, I love digibutter for what it is, but I still hold the belief that if you had retained some more of the classic phpBB forum features, even without Bitlands, I think you could have had a better chance at higher user retention and engagement over the years. Obviously though, hindsight is 20/20. I don’t blame you for moving to Discourse, and it’s still a whole lot nicer than endgame NERR 3.0 was, so thanks for that.
Rotating images at the top like the old NERR 1.x ads
A shop
Forum games
Extensive cool emotes
A radio (OST player)
A webring
An RSS feed
And a whole lot of other cool stuff
So hey, maybe NERR 5.0 could be something like this 10 years down the line or so. I guess I just kinda wanted to show you nerrs that this sort of thing is still possible in the modern day. Really, the hardest part about it all is just building up the community (it sure helps to have a not-dead IP ). Below is my mockup of what a NERR 3.5 might look like back from 2020. Anyone remember this?
I fixed some problems with my computer and might be able to post some assets for a future update. One thing I’d like is for users to be able to get star points with engagement and level up, with a cosmetic HP and FP count.
ah good ole phpbb, never die. I hacked in all kinds of crazy things to the original digibutter phpbb site. But the main reason i went away from it is because phpbb actually sucked for anyone who wasn’t already used to it and it doesn’t scale well and all those features were ugly unmaintainable hacks to the code base. At the time there were no alternatives so I experimented with building my own ideas and independently made a Reddit-like (2.0) and then Slack (3.0). but when building everything from scratch I lost time/energy to bring back the cool fun stuff along the way. :(
So anyways now that we have a solid base to work with, let me know, specifically, what you’d like to see. I’d like to bring back some of those fun little features from OG digi. Then I have to have time to do it, but with AI these days maybe it can take a few weeks instead of a year
Things I’ve considered…
Retro ugly theme
Bringing back Items
that apply cosmetic/action-messages to posts/profiles
that increase/decrease an HP stat on your profile
what else specifically?
(Some phpbb things i still won’t do like filling every post with “signatures” and extensive profile-info, and having to paginate through hundreds of pages to read a topic)
Thanks for the reply. phpBB may be a little messy, but it’s a cozy little mess. I can’t speak for the webmastry side of things, so I take your word on that.
I think you hit the nail right on the head with items/HP/stats/coins/shops/profile effects and more site theming. Those are the things I’d probably be most interested in, and I feel like they could do a lot of heavy lifting for the site. Otherwise, kinda like I mentioned above, rotating images or user ads at the top would be cool. I think there already is a Discourse plugin that exists for this. The radio idea is kinda nifty; being able to listen to the SPM/PM OST whilst reading threads would be neat. Though, this one may be more dependent on having more activity for it to be worthwhile. Besides that, adding emotes, and reactions would be neat. I guess a lot of theming stuff requires making art to go along with it, but you could probably dig up some old assets to reuse, and while I’m no amazing artist myself, I think there’s enough of us on here who’d be willing to help make some stuff.
Hopefully @LiquidHerr doesn’t mind me sharing, but he even made some really neat mockups of what could be done with the badges page, for example.
BTW if you have some css/html skillz and want to help with making an old-school theme, you can use this special Theme Creator site to create and view a theme all within the admin interface.
). Below is my mockup of what a NERR 3.5 might look like back from 2020. Anyone remember this?
