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06/29/2004:
workBLOGS . Support Forum


I'm at home working on the Support Forum I am creating for my freelance projects. The re-configuring started last night and I'm still finalizing and analyzing some parts.

I've decided to use the Invision Power Board, over YaBB which I've been using for almost five years already in a different forum. I get to evaluate PHPBB too. Each has their own strengths but in the end I have chosen Invision since currently it has more features compared to YaBB and PHPBB. Plus Invision is just one click installation in my current webhost and I find the Pre-register feature quite helpful on my part. (Of course after that there will be countless clicks when you're re-configuring/customizing things.)

Maintenance-wise, especially if you're doing the behind the scene manual hacks on the threads, things are easier done with YaBB. I've proven this countless times in the past when I'm moving threads saved on a hard disk to another server and combining each of them with the newly created ones. Of course the process still is cumbersome.

The directory structure of Invision is quite scary to look at compared to the way YaBB organizes its files. Although, YaBB has this tendency to save all threads on one directory, which if you're in a slow internet connection like me, would take quite a while before the listing of files are displayed inside the FTP client application. Multiply that delay of the loading time with the N processes you're doing on that directory.

Now after five hours and a half, I am faced with certain issues and concerns. One... would I allow CATEGORY_001.Forum_001 for Client_001 to be accessible for Client_002 who has CATEGORY_001.Forum_002? Consider too that there are issues that are affecting both clients. I made a sort of General Client Forum for some matters to somehow 'patch' this issue but I'm still looking for other alternatives.

Second issue would involve if I allow the guests or the other non-client members to view the Clients Section. Probably it would be good for potential clients but will it be beneficial to the existing clients. Nonetheless the client forums are protected by passwords.

Which will probably an issue too since some non-techie clients in my experience would prefer lesser clicks and lesser hindrances to what they want to do, something Microsoft gave weight before which probably lead to some security-related problems in some of their previous OSes.

Probably it would be good too if I organized the forums by product but since I would like to implement transparency on the program progress and would like to post progress reports on certain clients it would make things complicated in the long run.

Ah... probably I'll rest and empty my mind first so that I'll get a clearer view on how to tackle these issues.

This is one of the advantage of working at home... you're near your bed in times your mind needs defragging and recalibrating.