The original forum was built in Drupal, which is a fairly powerful and customizable platform. I used to have Drupal support through the University of Texas IT department, but I am no longer at UT so the support is no longer available to me. The old forum required some maintenance and had errors once in a while, some of which were hard to fix. The most recent errors prevented notifications from being sent for new posts, and I could not fix it... that was the last straw, so I decided to migrate the data to a new forum.
This new forum is built on phpBB. It is only designed to be a forum. It should need very little modification and should produce fewer errors. In fact the design is intentionally simple, meant to reduce distraction and keep focus on the most important part of the forum, the topics and replies.
There are a few other nice features too:
- It is lightweight and faster than the previous forum.
- It has a responsive design, which works well on tablets and smart phones.
- There are several languages available. However, this does not mean that it translates forum posts. Only the forum features are displayed in the chosen language, not the topic or comment text.
- The advanced search function has more options.
- Polls can be created.
- A dark theme is available.