tl;dr - Anyone that says that the devs aren't in control of the forums are wrong and I prove it in this thread. Lately I've seen some blatantly incorrect claims about how the forums work. I have a great deal of experience as a programmer and am one year away from getting a bachelors in computer science. It's kind of disturbing how wrong some of these claims are. Our KaW forums run on an open source forum script called phpBB. Since the script is open source, the source code, or code that makes up the forums is freely available and may be redistributed and modified by anyone. "Because phpBB is released under the GNU General Public License, you may make changes to the code without first having to obtain permission from the phpBB Group." (source: https://www.phpbb.com/about/ ) Feel free to read exactly what that licensing entails here. Since phpBB is open source, anyone can download and run the forum script for free. To further prove a point, I downloaded it. Now, I just need to unzip it and upload it to my server. Now, your average person doesn't have a computer dedicated for anything like this; but anyone can buy web space for cheap. Anyone can install and run this forum script. Here it is, uploaded to my server. Then I created an SQL database. All that's left to do is open my web browser, navigate to the directory (on my server) where I uploaded the forum script, and complete a basic installation (filling in database details, making a default admin account for the forums, etc). The final step is to delete the installation directory; and now I have my own installation of phpBB. Anyone that's used the forums on the pc: it looks familiar doesn't it? The default style, prosilver is shown. Other styles can be installed too. phpBB has an active modding community and there are hundreds of free, downloadable, user-created styles on the website. Furthermore, anyone can edit a style downloaded to fit their liking. I can also modify the code as I please! Let's say I want my background to be pink instead of grey. So on my server, I will navigate to Styles>prosilver>theme and edit the file colours.css All colors are hexadecimal. This thread is already long, Google it for an explanation. The colour is F5F7FA, which is a nice grey: █████ I'm going to change it to a nice pink, FF00FF. It looks like this: █████ And now, when I refresh the page: So what is the point to all of this? The developers do have complete control over their forums. Not only that, I demonstrated that phpBB can be edited with ease. Updating is also a simple task that they can perform in probably under 5 minutes. The forums were not written by KaW developers. KaW Developers installed phpBB just like I did and wrote some basic modifications to it. They didn't ask the "forum people" to do anything. The features this forum has aren't in the default installation of phpBB. The "forum people" didn't do anything to begin with! :lol: There are all sorts of mobile mods already available written by other people. The developers probably based the mobile version for the forums off of that. The people that are in charge of phpBB don't really get paid to work on it. They might make some money off of advertisements and endorsements of various webhosts, but this is more of a side project for them. Lastly, this line: If a client wants a feature, it gets implemented. That's the how software development works. The only reason that we got the forum update was because someone on the AtA team was told to do it. Why it didn't happen sooner? Laziness probably. Feel free to ask me questions.
I'm not really calling her out (specifically), it's just the most recent that I noticed. If you can point me in the direction of anyone saying misleading things about how the forums work, feel free to link them.
There are some managed solutions available for phpBB, but I think it would be unlikely that they would use something like that. People that use managed solutions are the ones that don't know much about computers. If AtA used something like that, I would have severe doubt about their business practices. 1. You can take control and manage your own forum script yourself...easily. 2. The fact that they'd use a managed phpBB installation for a community this size would be hilarious. I know that AtA doesn't know how to properly do release schedules, but this would make me doubt their business practices even more.
Yes, but this thread is to address misinformation, not call someone out. Especially if she was just repeating something that was said by a "credible source."