Site Stuff: My Decision on the Forums

Update: Hey y’all, the now new forums are now up. I still need to play around with the look of it, but it’s fully functional! Just click the link above or right here to head over and register. The good news, this forum has Tapatalk support, yay! The bad news, I wasn’t able to migrate posts and users over, so for that I apologize. You can see the old forums here for the time being, if you want to copy your posts over. Now you don’t have to register on the blog to post comments — though can if you still want to, if you want a custom avatar and such — so please head over to the forums and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Hey guys, how are you? First off, you may notice that we’re using WordPress comments for this post, and I’ll explain why in a moment. First, I want to thank everyone who signed up to help me with this experiment. It was fun, and I’m glad I tried it, but it opened my eyes to a few things.

First, the forum plugin, bbpress, is nice and simple, but honestly I think it’s TOO simple. I want this place to grow and expand and not just be a blog, but an even bigger community of awesome people than it already is. With its lack of search functionality and forum/thread granularity, for example, I think bbpress would get too unwieldy as it got bigger, making posts harder to find and providing a less-than-fun experience overall.

Secondly, I’ve realized throughout this I’ve always said I want this place to be a blog first, and…that can’t really happen in the forums are intertwined with the comments. I’ve been doing some research and a lot of thinking, and realize that it’s best if users have the option of both quickly commenting on a post and, if they choose, visiting the forums as well. That way the blog can be a gateway to the forums, but not dependent upon them. That way they don’t even have to go through a sign up process if they don’t want to, as WordPress’ comments system works pretty well as is.

Therefore, over the next day or two, I’ll be installing MyBB as our forum. I’ve done a lot of research on free forum software and played with some, and MyBB just clicked in terms of usability and feature set. I want to again thank you all for helping me with this experiment, it gave me a lot of insight. I’m hoping the new forum will be even more fun to use once it’s all set up. I also thank you for your patience in this. My site is growing faster than any blog I’ve ever had, and I’m trying to grow along with it, so it’s a big learning experience for me, and I thank you all for making it as awesome an experience as it’s been thus far. :)