Parallel Universes

[Guest]

Now, seeing as how this is the internet, I press all sorts of words on the screen to see what happens. Once you've been on the interent a bit, or if you've ever played with the interactive CD "Arthurs Teacher Trouble", you'd do the same. Bit like like boats really with lots of buttons to press... You know.

Anyway...goofing around hereabouts recently I happened across a tiny weeny little bit of script , just near the bottom of the lists of threads. It says "IPCMedia and WCSoft". ooh. WCsoft? Is this a toilet software link? No: press that bit of text and then select "products" and then click the "visit WwThreads website" (I think) and ooh! up comes a forum thingy, rather a lot like this. They sell forum software! And then there's a features/support link to all the things that you can make the forum do, like deleting and adding users, and stuff. And even more interestingly, a link to other piles of forums including..

http://relationships.bb.prodigy.net/ which uses the same forum software..with a whole load of forums about Divorce, Sleeping Around, Sleeping Around Rather A Lot and so on.

Seperately, there's
http://www.parenthoodplace.com
which is a bit boring, actually, with a Bedwetting Forum, the Toddlers Being Sick Forum and other stuff, can't remember.

Isn't this all interesting? Well, a bit interesting then?

And also, harumph, I thought that KH had slaved away and writ this forum software in three weeks, when actually it's $299 all in for a DIY forum kit. Or was it the special $5,000 version? Anyway, it throws away the posts after a while, perhaps. And you can have a look at the features and see what it can do.

Anyway, I'm just off back to snoop the Can't Help Taking My Clothes Off In Public forum...

 

[longjohnsilver]

Just returned from get your cacks off forum, pictures available somewhere but you really don't want to see them!!!

 

[kimhollamby]

Ummm...yes, we weren't silly when it came to the amount of dosh we wanted to spend on the underlying system. But if you remember we imported all the old messages ( originally flat HTML messages) we still had hold of, imported user identities, sorted out the database structure for it to sit in and made it fit the rest of ybw which is where a lot of effort went. We also tinkered a bit with some of the code. Oh yes...and we drank a lot of coffee and took a few minutes to smile a bit when it all worked.

Bonus ball for us in going this way is that we can also benefit from someone else's effort on upgrades in the future. No plans for significant upgrades yet as we are still digging up roads elsewhere but it was a sensible way to go for us at a time when we needed to put a fast and robust solution in place. Compared to some of the zillion pound internet solutions (aka rubbish) I have been offered over the past 12 months it feels good to have gone this way. Credit goes to Paul Lomax, our Perl programmer, who did the finding and adapting. Similar win recently on our new search tool for the site itself.

ps to clarify one point...threads are not automatically expired on this forum.