New Poker Copilot Discussion Forum

The new Poker Copilot discussion forum is here: http://forum.pokercopilot.com/

The forum uses new – and hopefully better – discussion forum software. The forum software and hosting is supplied by Vanilla Forums. I’ve been monitoring this for six months to make sure it is under active development. And it is.

The old forum was running on FogBugz. The discussion forums component of FogBugz doesn’t appear to have changed at all since I started using it for Poker Copilot, and it is lacking some useful features – like editing a post or uploading an attachment. I kept hoping things would improve but alas, they haven’t.

Why I don’t self-host discussion forum software

Two reasons: time and effort.

I outsource anything I can that doesn’t negatively impact the user experience. I don’t want to have to update operating systems, tune web-hosting software, or install discussion forum security patches. I don’t want to monitor yet another server to make sure it is always running smoothly. I’d much rather pay a reasonable monthly fee to have these problems taken care of for me.

If there is a newly-discovered security flaw in the forum software – or in the systems it is built on such as Apache, PHP, or MySQL – it won’t just affect me. It will affect all the companies being hosted by Vanilla Forums. When there are problems I can be reasonably confident that Vanilla will respond quickly. That’s what their business is about.

Oh and finally, I really dislike software like phpBB. I cringe when I find myself on a phpBB-based forum. It feels like I have stepped back a decade. However I do recognise that there are some highly successful web communities built on phpBB.