All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

I got a new LG VX8100 cell phone last week. It’s very nice. Anyway, another friend of mine has the same one and was asking me about it. THE place online to get information and help with mobile phones is HowardForums. Go…look around. Great stuff, great people.

Along with the server move, I deemed it extraneous to keep the forum up. I haven’t seen activity in there in a long time, so I didn’t see the point in it. If I get a lot of requests to create some again, I’ll be more than happy to reinstall a forum script again. I have a feeling this won’t happen though. So, if you’ll direct your attention to my contact form, I’ve edited the text to state that I’ll be cool with it if you ask me about a computer problem.

Question: I’m getting a lot of registrations in my forums from Russian domains. What gives? Should I ban these? Any suggestions? (Thanks!)

The forums have been converted to PunBB. All is well, after a minor problem with the script, in which David (the creator of the migration tool) quickly gave me a solution. It’s different, but I’m really liking it.

Any links to posts in the old forums will only redirect to the new forum index page. You have to search for the post, then edit your link to use the new URL. Sorry! With that note…

Do you know anyone that has computer-related questions, and you don’t want to answer? Don’t know how to answer? We might! There’a bunch of us that check the forums regularly, and we’ve been doing this for awhile. So, point them over, register, and join in! Why use one mind to answer complex questions when you can have more?

http://www.btvillarin.com/punbb/

Okay, that’s it. I’m switching from IPB 1.3.1 to PunBB. (more…)

I dropped in on a discussion in the WordPress forum about the possiblity of WordPress being spyware. (Don’t worry, it isn’t!) As I read on, I could see that the person just could not understand what everyone else was trying to tell him. Mind you, the core of the community was replying, yet he insisted a developer reply. They were!

Anyways, it led to him calling the community a bunch of Nazis. Then Podz simply labeled the thread over. Why? Because of Godwin’s law. I was amazed, because I’ve never heard of this before. It’s going to be forever embedded in my mind whenever I come across or get involved in a long argument.

I was replying as well, because he offended me as a WordPress community member. Plus, I was annoyed at his stupidity. I won’t reply anymore, though. I’ll just enjoy the “closed” thread as it dwindles down. I hope nobody else dwells on this, especially since this wasn’t even brought up until today. I’m just happy I learned about Godwin’s law.

Comments are open, unless that person I’m talking about comes in here. Then it’ll be closed.

I didn’t actually delete anything from the forums, but more like removed essentially inactive ones from the index page. I’m just trying to reduce clutter. Sorry if it shocked anyone (eh, I doubt it).

I replied to a Tom’s Hardware Guide thread in the Windows XP forum - something I haven’t done in a long time. I know we have our own forums here, but they’ve gotten really quiet. I know that one reason is because it’s not a really popular and well-known forum. However, I’m hoping that the other reason is that most everybody in there aren’t really having too many problems lately. (Luckily, I’m not - *knock on wood*) If this is the case, then I might as well help out where I can. (more…)

I just found out that I won’t be upgrading the forums anymore. They’re not offering the free trial, which is what I’ve been using as my forums script for the past few years.

Should I switch back to phpBB? (I’m not sure what quirks might come up though.) Or should I scrap the forums? How about start fresh with the smaller and faster PunBB? (Alex King uses PunBB, that’s where I first saw it.)

The forums have died down fairly significantly, except for the regulars that I love like family. Basically, I’m not sure what to do anymore.

Anyways, comments are appreciated. Thanks!

To my delight, IPB 2.0.0 is final! I’ll be aiming to upgrade our forums within the next couple of days.