So what’s this about finally fixing the forum?
It would appear its the same as always, just grumbling. Grumble grumble grumble.
I mean, this software… I hope the company’s not owned by Murray Rothbard’sbrother-in-law or something. But I’m actually suprised the company is still in business if this is what they sell. Preview just flat out doesn’t work (at least I’ve never seen it work). It’s got a jumble of mostly unfamiliar icons three times the height of the text, none of which I’d trust to not wipe out my post if I clicked them. Quoting is disabled by default and iwhen you want to quote it’s almost impossible to keep the text formatting from going wonky.
To put it mildly, it takes some getting used to!
I looked at the vBulletin site - they even have a forum there for customers to post in (and a “before you buy” forum too). I browsed through a bit - very easy to see all the different areas right from the main page. But reading through the posts it appears running a vBulletin forum requires a good bit of programming experience and knowledge about servers. Looks pretty complicated. But from a forum member stand point it would be fantastic. A nicer interface would be probably result in a larger crowd of inquisitive future austrians sticking around, and maybe attract a higher class of trolls than the than the current crop of dingleberries orbiting the socialist threads.
Grumble grumble grumble.
Wait, a company sells this forum software? I always assumed this was freeware of some sort or just something clobbered together over a weekend.
Maybe we should start a fundraiser to give the Institute the money to update this place.
I remember hearing it was homebrew and thats why all the problems.
It is not homebrew… it is an old version of Telligent forum software.
Long story short:
No money or manpower to upgrade the forum. The institute runs on a shoestring budget and has to spend their money on more important things.
I can offer some time to implement a new forum with the mises.org header and footer included. The only aspect I have not done before and might have struggle with is integrating the user list of the rest of the website with the other forum software. I could give it a try though, some forum software support third party user list integration out of the box, other forum software might require programming changes (which i am not too strong at). The other alternative would be to have a separate user list for the forum than the rest of the website but the forum otherwise would look and feel as a part of the site due to sharing the same footer and header.
Migrating the existing forum userlist and content including categories and similar should be ok to do but might take a few tweaks on the db level or a bit of troubleshooting. But that depends on a few factors. But I think it could be done relatively seamlessly.
It used to, along with the quote function and the spellchecker. That’s all in the past now since they had this guy try to improve and further develop the forum, and he broke the code.
Just registered over at the hyperboards site. I’ll still lurk here in hopes that people migrate over there but posting here, especially with quotes, is a pain.
I guess I spoke to soon; it won’t let me sign in over there. 
I was about to ask how you did it…
So far I know Autolykos has a forum at voluntaryism.freeforums.org and Wheylous is working on starting one at LibertyHQ.
I think it’d be good if we could find a way to get a libertarian forum going that will attract lots of others. I love mises.org, but to be fair its focus is primarily Austrian Economics, and while libertarianism is a natural part of that, it may be that we need a larger “umbrella” under which to discuss all the relevant topics. We need a one-stop-shop that covers it all, but I don’t know to what degree that fits in with the aims of the LvMI.
I’ve toyed around searching for domain names that are available (btw, a really cheap service for registering domains is Namecheap.com - check it out!). Damn Cato institute has already appropriated libertarianism.org, where I don’t think you can even find the phrase “non-aggression principle”. I found something like “FreeMarketNAP.com” isn’t registered yet and would cost $11 per year to register it with Namecheap (they also do shared hosting for around $5 per month - but for a dedicated server it’s $100/month or more).
Then there’s the forum software itself - vBulletin, UBB, MyBB, which also require you to have (and understand) MySQL, PHP, yadda yadda yadda. You have to have quite a bit of technical know-how to create a pretty forum like we’ve all probably seen elsewhere (I’m sure even the commies have a badass forum somewhere lol). Probably have to hire programmers and designers (or take a chance with freelancers).
It’s a big project for sure, but so worthwhile to figure out a way to do as there is nothing yet out there that fills that niche.
Looks like the forum in the original post to this thread was closed and opened as the Voluntaryism forum instead, which I was able to register for and successfuly post in. Hope to see you all there!
What jmorris said.
I’d encourage people to go to Autolykos’ forum, since he seems to actually want to deal with moderator crap :U.
I more or less just wanted to get the ball rolling.
Lead on, McDuck 