No matter how much you beg, pray, or pay, perfection isn't going to float to you on the ground gift-wrapped with a nice fat transaction fee for expedient delivery. But reaching gets you a little closer to the sky.
In short, we're getting nowhere with the move to new forum software, and we may end up waiting indefinitely for something that might not ever exist, much less exist now. While no solution exists to my knowledge that offers all of the requested features, there are many programs which would be a significant improvement over SMF.
This is not a whining thread. I'm not demanding anything, I'm not calling doom, I'm not issuing ultimatums that no one cares about. I'm asking what I, as a community member, and more broadly we, as a community, can do to move this forward in a realistic time frame. I'm not suggesting that we give up our initiative for custom software, only that we make progress now.
I suggest we implement an interim solution that improves the forum, though it may not provide all that a custom one would, and continue the bounty for custom software. This would provide two main advantages over continuing the trek up a hamster wheel: improved features and usability and tangible progress, both of significant importance and both immediate. I have never administrated a forum as large as this, nor have I ever transferred a forum from one management system to another, but it seems a transition to pre-existing, documented software from pre-existing, documented software should not be particularly hard to implement. Summarily, this would be an immediate solution that would provide significant improvement, stem the tide of forum-bashing, and be moderately easy to install.
Obviously I cannot do any of this alone. So, my questions are:
To moderators and administrators: Are you willing to pursue something akin to this? If so, what can we do to help?
And to users: The two I immediately thought of were vBulletin and Invision Power Board, but what forum software would you suggest?
