Comic Match

WastedNyght · Joined: 28 May 2007 Posts: 2

Hi,

I found your site a couple weeks ago, logged in and created an account on the rest of the site, listed my comic to try it out and noticed you've got this dual setup with phpBB and Everything else. I was going to stop by sooner and comment on this, but got busy. Anyway, have you tried merging the phpBB software with your own? I'm really impressed with the parts of the site you've built, and having a seperate forum must be kind of awkward.

A few months ago my own site (www.lepzard.com) was like this when I put it up, as my web host had an automatically installed version of phpBB and it was great, until I started trying to do what you're doing by writing my own user registry and site features and suddenly I had to explain to everyone that came by why they had to have two passwords and aliases. Eventually I just ditched phpBB because I felt comfortable enough to write my own forum software which would integrate with the rest of the code. However, I recall browsing and seeing that there are lots of "hacks" out there for phpBB, and always wondered if enough searching would yield a document that gave decent instructions on mining the user data from phpBB for use with something else. I'm pretty sure I've stumbled on a few phpBB forums like this as well that have managed to comingle software, but for all I know they just expanded phpBB instead of taking something from the ground up and trying to coexist.

Long story short (?) I got into running a web site for kicks to play with PHP and started a half assed little web comic as one of a few things to use as a hook to draw users, and that led me here, and seeing what you're doing I just can't resist commenting. Laughing

All in all, my two cents is just that there may be some way to merge your site and phpBB out there and that'd be really awesome if you could pull it off. It's so frusterating to have a great forum software like this be so darn incompatable. Speaking of which, do you have any problem with AOL users getting logged off repeatedly do to their IP address issues?

eddiec · Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 6:34 pm Post subject:

Hi, thanks for the comments. On other sites I've worked on I've merged phpBB's logins with the rest of the site, but I often had to tinker with it when new releases of phpBB came out. Also, there were so many phpBB hack attacks out there that I started to worry about compromising the security of the rest of the site. This way, if somebody breaks through phpBB's security, only the forum is compromised. And visa versa.

For Comic Match, I've be letting informe.com manage the forum offsite. But this prevents any kind of integration, even graphical. I will eventually change this so I host and manage the forum myself again.

I've had Simple Machines recommended to me, and it supports integration between site and forum via SSI (Server Side Includes). In the coming months I'll be putting Comic Match through yet another site redesign and the forums will probably change then.

Eddie
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WastedNyght · Joined: 28 May 2007 Posts: 2

Hey Eddie,

I probably should have noted the URL for the forum and seen that. But I'm glad to hear you've managed to rig phpBB up with other projects before. And I think my 2 cents is spent... Laughing