Hi, my name is François Faubert.

As I took the time to explain in a post in The Music Tank’s new forum, I’ve been using the second version of phpBB for what seemed like forever on the website. Until the recent redesign, I grew increasingly unsatisfied with the board on two subjects: the spam filtering and the general administration interface.

There weren’t any validation to make sure the user was a valid poster or registrant nor was it that easy to perform relatively simple tasks in the administration area (to edit a user’s access rights for instance).

That’s why I didn’t reinstall phpBB version 2 on The Music Tank. However, I’ve been reading cool stuff on the upcoming third version as it promised to have all of what I thought was missing from the second version. Instead of moving to another board script I finally gave in and installed the fifth beta release of the third version. Besides, I’m willing to tolerate some faux-pas to support open-source software.

The installation experience, as a user that doesn’t know that much on hardware-ish issues, was incredible. It may have taken a lot of time, but things went very smoothly and required limited effort on my part. There were informatial text blurbs on every step I needed to perform. No guessing around.

Visually, the default design has been given a more up-to-date look. Most important for me as an admin, a massive overhaul of everything related to the administration has been done. It makes management incredibly more structured, though there are about ten sections with seven subsections each. That many different menus to go through which can grow a bit confusing.

Only time will tell how efficient the new version of the board is on The Music Tank. Keeping in mind the current release is not even a Release Candidate, one should expect that features are bound to blow up from times to times, but nothing did come up in the short period I’ve been using it. For the moment, I can only say good things about the third release of phpBB.