BuxHost Blog

With this blog post I'd like to update you about the upcoming new changes for NextGen concerning the forum. Since March 2009, we have been offering a free phpBB forum along with the NextGen script. The number one reason to use a third party forum is the incredible amount of work involved in building such a forum. phpBB is a non-profit organization, who built the phpBB forum in more than 10 years. Since we like to focus on improving NextGen - a PTC script, not a forum - most of our efforts have been put in optimizing the script itself rather than the forum.


Over the last year, we've received an increasing amount of support ticket about the phpBB forum. Here's the top three:

1. Spam. Since phpBB is a worldwide commonly used forum, spammers have created spambots that will flood phpBB forums with thousands of spam posts in a short period of time. Deleting these posts is a waste of time. Forum addons as well as some suggestions to fine-tune the forum settings are availeble to minimize usage of spambots, although this is not a 100% foolproof solution.

2. Too difficult. The phpBB forum is an incredible forum, with many features and settings. However, most of them are not needed, which makes it more difficult to go through all settings in order to find the one you're looking for. Especially the permissions for the various groups seem to be an ongoing difficulty.

3. Double accounts. Members need to create an additional forum account in order to use it. Not only this requires an extra step for your members, it also poses an security risk when it comes to identity theft.


For the reasons above we've decided to build a forum from scratch, integrated in NextGen. It took us more than 4 months to design, implement and test, but I'm sure it's well worth it. The forum has been built to be managed intuitively, so even those who are not technically experienced can manage the forum. We're currently alpha-testing NextGen v4.30 with build-in forum support with customers on private servers. If things go well, beta-testing will start in a few weeks from now.


A few answers to commonly asked questions:

- For new customers/websites: The phpBB forum will be offered for the time being along with the build-in forum. You can choose which forum you'd like to use.

- For existing customers/websites: If you're on a phpBB forum, it will be hosted for you free of charge for as long as you're using it. If you decide to switch in the future to the build-in forum, it would be great if you could notify us so your phpBB forum can be removed to free up server resources.

- You can't transfer posts from a phpBB forum to the new build-in forum. This means that if you switch from phpBB to the build-in forum, you start with an empty forum again. Therefore, in some cases it may be worth to continue using the phpBB forum when you have a large forum and no difficulties managing it.

- In v4.30, you'll have three options: you can disable the forum completely, link to an external forum or use the build-in forum.


If you have more questions, feel free to ask :)

Best regards,
BuxHost Development Team