posting a poll here to gauge your opinions as a community.
As you're aware, we haven't accepted new sign-ups since 2016 (unless people manually approached me via email) due to a spambot problem. The forum software is all sorts of outdated since 2012, and updating it is generally troublesome.
However, if we surrender certain "nice things", we can update to the newest version (phpBB 3.2), fix the spambot issue, get the newest security fixes in and generally get our forums back up-to-date.
The "nice things" lost in question are:
- The entire UnrealSP theme. It would be replaced with a generic phpBB theme, styled in white and blue.
- Permanently: Custom modifications for the 2012 UnrealSP relaunch. They are barely in use, anyway.
- Temporarily (until further notice): Modifications such as smileys, avatars, custom BBcodes like [sshot] and [spoiler], etc. Those will all be fine!
- Perhaps more I'm not keeping track of!
The forums would look something like this:
On the bright side, that default style would probably be better optimized for mobile.
I would eventually re-instate an UnrealSP-focused theme, however this would be after the main site re-launch (development on which is going great, by the way; check the Discord chat!)
What do you think? Should I prioritize a safe and secure forum re-launch before anything else, or wait until the new main site is finished and I can devote myself to modernizing the forums and keeping them in-tune with the new main site?