Forum Software?

[VicParticipant @vic]

A while ago I came to realise that nearly all the forums I visit regularly all use the same software – Community platform by XenForo® © 2010-2025 XenForo Ltd.

It seems to work well. What was the reason again for choosing something different for this site?

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

How long have you got? There is a 35 page topic on comments about the new forum software.

In a nutshell, the previous owner of the magazine was using a non standard bespoke system to host their Model Engineering and Model Boating forums. Simply extracting the data for use  on a new platform was an utter nightmare and cost a lot of money.

Mortons decided that they wanted to integrate these two forums into their own Website platform which is based around WordPress which is not actually a very good vehicle for hosting forums of this nature. The task was so difficult that the original contractors walked off the job and Morton’s IT staff had to step in to finish it despite being unfamiliar with the mechanics of using WordPress for the purpose. After a long, long time and enormous expense, we have now got what you are presently using. What the future holds now that the magazines have been sold on to Kelsey remains to be seen.

With the benefit of hindsight it would have been better to have set up the forums as standalone entities using purpose made off the shelf software but the management decision was otherwise.

Colin

[VicParticipant @vic]

Thanks for the concise reply. 😉

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