I am sure many of you have noticed and/or experienced problems with the forum lately. After many years of manually coded updates and numerous hacking/spamming attempts the forum software is not doing so well. I will be installing a fresh copy of the PHPBB software very soon that will remedy most if not all of the problems we have been experiencing.
Here is the catch. We will likely lose some of the less used mods here on the forum. We will probably lose the chatroom which is rarely if ever used. We will also lose the caving news widget on the bottom of the index page. That particular widget severely slows the loading time of the index page and really does not get a lot of attention.
One area in question is the shoutbox, some say to get rid of it others say to keep it. I know the shoutbox does get occasional use so I will leave that up to the members. The current shoutbox we use is completely outdated and no longer supported by the original author and is no longer available for download. This means if we choose to keep the shoutbox we will have to use a different version (not a big deal most are very similar).
I will take input on which mods to keep and which to lose over the next week. If you have a reason we should keep some of these features let em know or if you would like to see something go also let me know.
I would like to perform this update within the next 2 weeks. I will announce the exact date when it is known but Cavechat will likely be down for several hours during the update. After the update we will be implementing several new features on the forum and the Cavechat iPhone app should be ready this summer.