@ All MM-friends:

Since Joe was so nice to change the layout of our boards in a more customized way, it is not so obvious any more that our boards are working with a forum software called YaBB 2.1

Well, YaBB theirselves have a forum as well and today I did register over there. What did I learn so far?

1°
A post from the 31st of May 2007 from an Administrator: "The release of YaBB 2.2 is very near.  Don't let the small version number change fool you.  This is a HUGE release - more optimizations, more security, more spam-fighting tools, many more features, and a lot less bugs.  This is the BEST YaBB ever."
It is always near, but when is it really coming? THAT is the question.

2°
Already on the 11th of November 2005 (!!) they were aware that there was a problem with replying on PMs when there are more than 3. In the new version it will be fixed.

3°
Aha!! And on the 16th of Juin 2007 the wrong counting of posts got noticed. And is fixed as well in 2.2 .

The only thing I didn't find so far is the disappearing of posts in "some" threads. But, please give me some time. Because there are ... ... 120 pages of topics about troubleshooting and 24 pages with topics about fixed bugs for version 2.2 .

That is the story so far. I like to inform you, when I know more. And when version 2.2 is available, I will ask Vern for an upgrade.

I find out that there is help, that doesn't help ... me. :-[ :'( >:(

Besides the website from YaBB with its own forum, there exists an other website: http://www.boardmod.org/yabb/YaBB.pl. That is an open sourse project for YaBB-modifications. There I saw solutions for "almost everything", but there is a serious problem to use them. Just open the attachment about how to recuperate lost threads and you will understand and hopefully forgive me.

Btw, since YaBB is open source, the development of this software, including the new version 2.2, is in the hands of volunteers who do this in their free time. That is why it takes so long AND there isn't any idea of a date of release. The good news is that the latest beta from 2.2 seems to be very stable.

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Thanks for your great detective work, Freddy.

That's good news for us, hopefully all the bugs that trouble us will soon belong to the past....

The only thing I want to realize now, is a system to back-up. But even that seems to be very complicated.

In a matter of fact I wonder why a forumosoftware does NOT contain a back-up tool for the admins. That feels so obvious. ::)

Right !  That's a real ommission....

But yesterday I was thinking that for safety purposes a "private, hand-made backup" should be possible, at least.
It involves some work, though.

It could work like this:
One member of our group is responsible for all / or a certain amount of topics. Every night (or week) he checks if there are already so many new posts to fill a page.....  each (new) page is then saved privately (as "webarchive" or text-file) into some private back-up folder / volume.   I know it's dirty work, but someone has to do it.

To make it less frustrating, we could declare a back-up person responsible for only 1 topic each, so we end up with 20 people or so.
DISADVANTAGE: This might create quite some chaos..... people might be using different methods, might forget things etc.

And although with this backup method we wouldn't have a backup that could be instantly brought back to work (in case of a major loss), but at least we wouldn't lose valuable information. At least the "knowledge" wasn't lost !!