Hi guys,

I used to visit Ace's all the time but kinda stopped after it switched to phpBB. I'm a little nostalgic now seeing that some familiar names are still posting here.

Personally I really liked the "old school" message board software Ace's used, which I think (?) was custom written. It was super-fast, the threads weren't just flat lists, you could tell who was replying to whom, and you didn't have to scroll and page all over to see which posts were new.

My three favorite message boards on the internet (one of them being Ace's) have all switched to phpBB for various reasons and I got kinda tired of it and started this service last week:

www.atomboards.com

It's basically free hosting of these old style message boards which I prefer.

So I would be honored and flattered if the Ace's community switched over to my software, if there's any interest. So far I've been getting minimal traffic so the service has not really been "stress tested" so I wouldn't even recommend switching most of the traffic over. But maybe try it out with the off-topic board?

If you log into atomBoards and check it out you can see that the HTML is fully configurable so it would be fairly easy to make Ace's-like banners and put some ads on it to support the moderators. I would be happy to host some graphics.

Anyway, just wanted to float that out there and see if anybody else was feeling nostalgic.

-Tom

I think many ppl miss the old board, myself included. I only glanced at your site quickly, but I do like the idea and will test it further. I have to wonder though, why the frame? Its a bit silly to have to scroll horizontally in long threads when you have a large widescreen monitor.

Also, it might be a bit of a PITA to transfer aces to yet another platform, losing all posts, requiring ppl to sign up yet again... I know phpBB isn't ideal (remember, this was meant as a stopgap solution until the old site was redone, which never happened), but constantly switching over isn't ideal either. Furthermore, although it might be due to me not registering yet, a few key features still seem missing on your board (indication of "new" posts, search, email notification, hyperlinking, some basic formatting options,...).

That said, I wouldn't mind having back the old threaded style, so perhaps once your board is more mature, we can hold a poll over it.

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. I have a lot of features in mind which I hope to get to and that gives me an idea of what's missing to people at first blush. Like I said, the site is only a week old.

As for the frame, you can log in and create your own message board style and change the HTML surrounding the board to whatever you want.

That being said, I do wrap the text at 70 characters because it's a little easier and straightforward (I can use the <pre> tag) and it allows for the ">" style of quoting--which is like the old Ace's boards, IIRC. Another advantage of this is that according to usability experiments, narrower text is faster and easier to read.

The disadvantage is that if you use a non-monospaced font the text can look pretty jagged at the right and the whole post looks pretty thin on our widescreen, high resolution monitors.

It's a trade-off that I haven't figured out how to get around yet. :/

nobody's forced to always have the browser in maximized / full screen mode ... that's what wide screen monitors are good for btw, having windows _next_to_ each others, to have more information at a time. No?

I'd also very much appreciate to come back to a board that's more like the old ace's one btw.

the posts itself can be limited in width, as indeed its not pleasant to read very wide texts. But the thread overview could well be as wide as the browser, I remember plenty looong Aces' threads where my widescreen monitor wasn't nearly wide enough :)

I'm also quite happy to see you reuse the ">" quoting (although changing the color like on Aces is probably a good idea) But as you probably know yourself, the missing features are I think too much for now to really start using it for anything but a test. At the very least I would like to see:
- email notification
- edit function (possibly time limited)
- search function. One that works better than on the old Aces please :)
- hyperlinks automatically "linked"
- basic formatting (monotype, bold, italic, .. perhaps image tags)

Over time some of the old finetuned features of Aces' would also be much appreciated like the ignore list, reporting of spam/abuse, "next unread" navigation, etc. And perhaps also some things I thought the old one lacked, like a threaded view that shows title + 1 or 2 lines of the (non quoted) post.

As for "splitting" the forum and have, as you suggested, the OT board some place and the rest someplace else (with different logins etc), its probably not a good idea. Its not like I have much control over this phpBB board to somehow integrate them at least somewhat. A "big bang" will probably be necessary should we move again.

I'll get to work on all this as time permits. I think my first priority is RSS but I'll put the others at the top of my list too.

I forget how the old Ace's "changed color" in the quotes...?

Also how did Ace's do search and what was bad about it? I'm slightly concerned about search performance on anything but the message subjects... but we'll see...

Example: http://web.archive.org/web/20020330132912/www.aceshardware.com/forum?read=65033127

Thanks, I'm glad you gave me a link to this. I think it looks better than what I'm doing. I may copy a lot of the styling...

Here's how quotes looked in the end:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060325031534/aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?id=115156251&forumid=1