I've been using SMF for decades. It's free, pretty stable, and I know it like the back of my hand. But it looks antiquated, no matter what theme I try to use. In the war to gain new members, I think this could be killing my forum, so I've been taking notice of the forum software that the various sites I frequent use. Number one, is XenForo. It helps that I like it as well, as it's clean, modern, and has a bunch of features that I could use. But...
Making the switch is difficult. Right now, I have zero member participation. It will cost me over $200 just to get the core license, and the add-ons that I want, not to forget looking into a customized theme, because as awesome as the default theme is, there's always a different look that would benefit my site branding better. And if I'm going all in with new software, maybe I should take this opportunity to hire some people to professionally create my branding. After all, looks are always going to be considered before content.
While I'm contemplating this transition, I should come up with a list of additions that I will want. Being that my website is an anime and role playing website, one feature I know I'm going to want is sub-accounts. This is a feature that allows members to post as different users (or characters in my specific use-case), which would give a more immersive role playing feel while participating on the site. So far, this is the only extension that's caught my eye.
But, I could just stick with SMF. It does mostly what I need, and I have many customization already implemented, perhaps too many. The problem is that while SMF is stable, I don't see it getting a visible face lift anytime soon. The developer team is working on 3.0, but from what I understand, that's all under-the-hood code re-working, making the code base OOP functional versus procedural. Once that happens, I'll loose my ability to hack the guts of the forum, because as much as I try, I just can not wrap my head around OOP coding. Perhaps my brain is too simple to understand something so complicated. Or, maybe I'm just too old anymore, and tired.
Maybe I should wait for to implement a transision and start fresh, with a host of new members--assuming I can gather these people from who-knows-where. As it is right now, my forum seems to be a cluttered mess. I've got ancient posts, that I originally thought would have been a good idea, to show how people have role played in the past, but all that did was waste my time, and disorganize my content. I tried to install various gamifications, but I think that just added more clutter as well.
And if I do decide to transfer over to a different software, it may be best to just start over from scratch. Having zero active members, means that I could just build a test site on the side, convert that site over to the new software once I have the funding available to purchase the licenesing. So many questions!
I've been using SMF for decades. It's free, pretty stable, and I know it like the back of my hand. But it looks antiquated, no matter what theme I try to use. In the war to gain new members, I think this could be killing my forum, so I've been taking notice of the forum software that the various sites I frequent use. Number one, is XenForo. It helps that I like it as well, as it's clean, modern, and has a bunch of features that I could use. But...
Making the switch is difficult. Right now, I have zero member participation. It will cost me over $200 just to get the core license, and the add-ons that I want, not to forget looking into a customized theme, because as awesome as the default theme is, there's always a different look that would benefit my site branding better. And if I'm going all in with new software, maybe I should take this opportunity to hire some people to professionally create my branding. After all, looks are always going to be considered before content.
While I'm contemplating this transition, I should come up with a list of additions that I will want. Being that my website is an anime and role playing website, one feature I know I'm going to want is sub-accounts. This is a feature that allows members to post as different users (or characters in my specific use-case), which would give a more immersive role playing feel while participating on the site. So far, this is the only extension that's caught my eye.
But, I could just stick with SMF. It does mostly what I need, and I have many customization already implemented, perhaps too many. The problem is that while SMF is stable, I don't see it getting a visible face lift anytime soon. The developer team is working on 3.0, but from what I understand, that's all under-the-hood code re-working, making the code base OOP functional versus procedural. Once that happens, I'll loose my ability to hack the guts of the forum, because as much as I try, I just can not wrap my head around OOP coding. Perhaps my brain is too simple to understand something so complicated. Or, maybe I'm just too old anymore, and tired.
Maybe I should wait for to implement a transision and start fresh, with a host of new members--assuming I can gather these people from who-knows-where. As it is right now, my forum seems to be a cluttered mess. I've got ancient posts, that I originally thought would have been a good idea, to show how people have role played in the past, but all that did was waste my time, and disorganize my content. I tried to install various gamifications, but I think that just added more clutter as well.
And if I do decide to transfer over to a different software, it may be best to just start over from scratch. Having zero active members, means that I could just build a test site on the side, convert that site over to the new software once I have the funding available to purchase the licenesing. So many questions!