Forum Issues - Please Read!

[bornannoying]

There seem to be a few problems with the forum lately. Specifically, the board doesn't look to be issuing activation emails to new users, and may not be sending other admin emails such as notifications of private messages, too. I notice from the phpBB user forums that others have experienced the same issue and made little progress towards a solution so, to begin with, I plan to update the installation to the latest release. That'll mean some downtime during the day (UK time) tomorrow.

In the meantime, please post to this thread if you've had any problems at all*, especially anything like not receiving notifications about PMs, etc.

Thanks.

* with the board, that is. Not your mortgage payments, or the carburettor in your wife's car, etc.

[jarek]

Hey man

I have problem with PM .I can't send anything

[bornannoying]

I've just sent you a PM. It seemed to work, so let me know if you receive it. If not, or if you still can't send PMs, let me know and we'll try figuring it out.

[Jot]

Now I seem to have a problem with PM as well. I did compose a message and clicked 'submit', I was told it was successfully sent but it still sits in the 'Outbox', and is not under 'Sent Messages'. So I am not sure whether it got out or not. So I sent you BA a PM too. It also sits in my outbox. Or do they only get moved once the recipient user logs in?

[eht13]

Now I seem to have a problem with PM as well. I did compose a message and clicked 'submit', I was told it was successfully sent but it still sits in the 'Outbox', and is not under 'Sent Messages'. So I am not sure whether it got out or not. So I sent you BA a PM too. It also sits in my outbox. Or do they only get moved once the recipient user logs in?

Yes, they only move from Outbox to Sent once the recipient logs in (though I'm not sure if they just need to log in, or if they also need to actually read the message).

[bornannoying]

Yes, they only move from Outbox to Sent once the recipient logs in (though I'm not sure if they just need to log in, or if they also need to actually read the message).[/quote]

This is correct, and I gather that the recipient has to actually read the message before it moves to the sender's "sent" folder. However, I did have a problem sending PMs a while back and it turned out to be that my folders were full so, for anyone that has a problem, please check that first.

I did some maintenance a while back that seemed to cure the issues originally referred to in this thread, however, I didn't get an email notification for Jot's recent PM about his problem, so possibly something is going wrong again. If anyone that usually gets email notification for their PMs has noticed that they're not getting these notifications, please let me know.

I'm increasingly weary of phpBB.

[Jot]

Ah...alright. Now the PM to BA has moved to the 'Sent' box, I was confused about the fact it stayed in the 'Outbox'. Actually that's a nice feature with the advantage that you can alter or delete the message if necessary, until the recipient finally reads it. The folder wasn't full (not at all), I hardly sent any messages, otherwise I would have known better I guess. And I didn't get the email notification, although I did in the past.
Thanks for checking!

[eht13]

I'm increasingly weary of phpBB.

Just curious, how do you think it compares to vBulletin?

[bornannoying]

I'm increasingly weary of phpBB.

Just curious, how do you think it compares to vBulletin?

Weird. I typed a long response to this... must've forgotten to hit the send button. Fuck. Sorry about that. I think the general gist of what I said was this:

I've only experienced vBulletin as a user. There's a forum I visit which has an out of date version of vBulletin, which results in lots of serious glitches: most people can't log in using their regular browser, many people can't edit their posts, some email addresses are incorrectly rejected… you get the idea. So at the very least, I can say that phpBB is fairly robust, in the sense that I can do next to nothing in the way of admin, let it get a versions old, etc., without any serious problems occurring.

On the other hand – and as I say, this isn't by way of comparison since I've only used phpBB – phpBB has its problems. It has annoyed me that, until very recently, the best anti-spam measures for phpBB were available only as a 3rd party mods and, consequently, were without proper support and, in most cases, made it necessary to conduct any system updates manually which, though not hard, is very tedious and long winded. They've upped their game recently by including some anti-spam stuff that's probably sufficient without the 3rd party kit, but there are other obvious functionalities which are still not included as standard.

The other pain in the balls is skinning the board. Honestly, there's a good reason why you only ever see fugly phpBB boards: making a half decent skin for it is just too labour intensive a proposition to consider. If I ever had to build a site where I couldn't live with having a forum dressed in one of the standard skins, I'd have to look for a different forum.