Now available for testing: dBoard 3.0 Beta

More than 3 years in the making, dBoard 3.0 is rapidly nearing completion and a beta version is now available for user testing at: This test board is identical to the main board as of about 11:00 AM this morning eastern time US, including all threads and messages. So that it's easy to tell when you're at the new board I've given it a slightly ruddy background, instead of black. I've created a thread at the test board for posting information about problems, issues and bugs: Reasons for helping test dBoard 3.0:

1. No moderation!
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2. Did you ever want to have full director powers? Just ask by posting to this thread! Directors can perform any and all board management operations, like creating new forums, suspending members, changing the boards appearance, and so on. Since the testing is being done on a copy of the board and not on the main board, no damage can be done. Of course, repeatedly copying the original board to the test area can grow tedious, so if too many "mistakes" are made I'll have to reconsider letting anyone be director.
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3. There are many improvements. Many are internal, such as moving all message data into a MySQL database (Did you know that there are over a half million messages at EvC?), but there are a number of visible improvements.

dBoard 3.0 is still a work in progress. It has some rough edges, and the database searches require more optimization, but it is important that it be released soon because the number of messages at EvC Forum has grown so large that moving them from their current text files into the MySQL database takes several hours, and some steps in the process are manual. If the number of messages grows much larger the process could become prohibitive.So please help get dBoard 3.0 ready for prime time by testing dBoard 3.0 Beta. In fact, use it instead of the main board for a while. When the main board is finally updated to 3.0 I'll keep the test board in place while discussions in progress complete.Thanks in advance for your help!Edited by Admin, : Fix link.Edited by Admin, : Redirect link to the test thread, which no longer exists, back to this thread.

I have for some time now, been trying to figure out what license dBoard is made under. As i have seen Percy asking for others to help out programming the board, i presume it is under a open source license of some sort?Im curious since i probably would like to use dBoard for another board at one point.

Hi Percy,Can I have directors powers to play around with?I like the way you can limit a thread to only one posters posts, it lets me marvel at my own wit and intelligence without having to read the prattling of everyone else, speeds up my ego tripping no end.It would be even better if you could limit it to only 2 peoples posts, then everyone could feel like they were having their own great debate.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

dBoard is not open source, but it will soon be become publicly available. We haven't yet been able to give much thought to this next stage, but it is important that we get feedback about the installation process. If you would like to be a beta site this should be possible fairly soon.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

You now have director privileges over at the test board, use your new powers carefully. Feel free to play with all the board settings, but take care to restore any settings to their original state, or to leave them in a reasonable state. I'm considering addition of an inverse, a link that displays the thread with everyone *but* that person's posts. More difficult to implement but probably more useful would be a personal preference setting that allows you to define a list of members you'd like to ignore. Their posts would never appear for you in the display of threads.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I would like to test it. Install/configure it and play around with it, and give the feedback, but i wont use a beta for production purposes. Free of charge but proprietary? That makes baby bambi cry

Join the programming team. dBoard is written in Perl with a fair amount of Javascript. And you can always make changes to your own copy.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Cool.I don't want moderator powers, but I would like to offer myself up as a martyr if anyone wants to practice suspension or other reprimanding procedures on my Stile account.Have fun.

I'm just giving this a bump to encourage people to help test the new board software. A few bugs have already been uncovered (a big thanks for the help finding them!), which I fixed last night and this morning. The test board can be found at: You can visit all the pages without logging in, but you'll have to log in the first time you try to post a message.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Can i ask why it's so private?Open sourcing dBoard would be a great motivation for a lot of developers to join in, including myself.

My short term goal is to improve its quality (ease of installation and upgrade is by far my biggest concern) so that it can be given away to see if it can gain any traction.My long term goal is a salable product that matches vBulletin in capability but undercuts its price by about 90%. Naturally any developers would share in any profits, should there be any, but its too early to begin thinking about such details. I don't know that the Internet needs another open-source bulletin board. There's phpBB and YaBB that I can think of off the top of my head, and I know there are a number of others.I've never participated in open source development. How does it work?

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Hi Percy,I didn't realize that you were writing all the code for the software for this board. That's pretty awesome!This is by far my favorite discussion board software that I've ever come across. A big part of the reason that I've stuck around here so long is becuase of the functionality of the board software. A buddy of mine made a board for our guild using vBulletin, and I was all: "Ugh, this shit sucks. EvC is way better."Thanks for making such a great place for all of us!

*seconded.The message-reply-link-up system is insanely crazy-good. And I really like the email-when-someone's-replied-directly-to-one-of-your-messages feature.I'll try to go to other boards, but I find refreshing the page "just to see if anyone's replied" to be tedious. Especially if conversations aren't rapid. And the same exasperation with a "get an email whenever anyone replies to anything in the thread" feature. I've actually looked at other message boards and thought "gee... how does anyone follow anything here?"The structure at EvC is beyond compare to anything else I've seen.All the other features are just niceties and cool-to-have's, but they're certainly appreciated as well.[/sucking up]

You always need more software. Alternatives and competition are great. It's works however you want it to work. You can set yourself as Benevolent Dictator, meaning you still control as much as you want. Except that if people dont agree with the way your doing your job, they can fork the software, and continue to develop on it as their own project.Or, you can do whatever..The license you choose limits the use of your code by others.For exampel, if you choose to put your code under a GPL license, developers can choose to fork the project and develop further on their own, however, all changes they make must be open source.If you choose a BSD license, people can fork and make proprietary changes in your software as long as you are credited in the license for that product.They are many more ofcourse, but those two describes the two categories of open source.Dual licensing is also an option when going commercial with something.

Thanks for the information. I suppose if dBoard had started as a group effort, even if only two people, that I wouldn't feel such a strong sense of ownership, but every innovation in dBoard is mine and I couldn't just throw it open with the possibility that anyone could do with it what they will.A couple people have recently volunteered to help out, though they're still coming up to speed, and we'd love to have you join us. I understand your feelings about non-open source, but it needn't be a showstopper.Oh, before I forget, Catholic Scientist and Stile, thanks for the attaboys, much appreciated. I'd also like to encourage you and everyone to give the test board a workout and give me your feedback. Adminnemooseus just posted his comments at http://test.///cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&m=103623. He didn't post about bugs but about his reaction to the changes. I take feedback like this very seriously, it definitely has an impact.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director