phpBB has finally, after much waiting and anticipation, released their new version, phpBB3 Olympus. It’s been a pretty long while since I was last knee deep in the market of forum skinning, but it might just be something I start doing more of. Why now? Because the new version 3, is just as they claim, gold.
My husband started using version 3 a few months ago on his forum when it was still in the release candidate stage. On version 2, I had hacked and tweaked as much as I could to get spammers down, and we were having pretty good results, only about 1-2 spammers a day. But since using version 3, we have had a grand total of ZERO spammers. Now, there’s not much you can do about those idiot manual spammers that go through the same process as any new member, registering, confirming, and then posting their propaganda, but robot spammers are a thing of the past on his site.
Not only is it knocking out the spam, but it is loaded with awesome features. Things we’ve been using for years with mods and hacks, plus some really great new features that would probably be familiar to vB users. In phpBB2, if you wanted subforums, you went through the 3 hour task of installing the categories hierarchy hack. Now, you can make as many levels of forums as you want. You can even insert a link as a forum. Things like this are old news to vB people, but not to use freeloaders that use phpBB. There are a trillion more features that make Olympus great, go read about them at their site.
My personal favorite, is the new theme they’ve released called prosilver. It is a front-end developers dream. It’s completely tableless, and they took a lot more consideration for SEO. I do have to say that the style sheets are a confusing mess, but I plan on releasing a simplified version when I get some spare time.
We have also begun the painstaking process of porting all of the vB and phpBB2 skins over at ForumMonkeys to phpBB3. This isn’t as easy at it might sound, and it’ll take time, but we’re hoping it’s worth it in the long run.
So if you’re on the hunt for an awesome forum script that also happens to be free, or you’re a seasoned veteran in the World Wide Web War between all that is currently available, you gotta check the new phpBB3 out.