Actually. Now that I think about it. I know who you are now, and why you piss me off now. Cause I remember the name now. You're the punk who was forced to apologize to me after you rl threatened me during an OSW while I was in Sic Noc targeting the small accounts in your family. And tell me I'm wrong because I would love to go get the SS I took and sent to the devs about it.
phpBB is written in: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and SQL. These are not niche languages. You can learn the basics of HTML and CSS in an afternoon (and I would recommend it because it's pretty cool when you realize the potential). Making changes to the forum doesn't require any super special knowledge past being familiar with the languages I listed. There is even documentation on the phpBB website. Unless you have some serious claims to fame or a large amount of experience, it's difficult to land a programming job without a degree in CS. Most degrees give some experience in PHP, and I haven't met a programmer unfamiliar with JS, HTML, or CSS. SQL is significant as well. Response to Lovely's post will follow in a bit.
By response to my post, he means he will PM me about how my post is reasonable and respectable, after talking about the weather and admitting we have a bad past.
How do you know that the devs run the forum code themselves on their own server? ATA started as a tiny few men company who developed games. I seriously doubt that they set up forums themselves but they just outsourced that job to one of the gazillions one man companies offering tailored forums. I myself am an IT sysadmin who could learn that crap and install it in half a day. Would I do it myself or just buy a 10$/month solution if I had better things to do (and no own server)? Plenty of coding is restricted on KaW's forum version (yes, I tried a few functions that usually would work on phpBB forums), but hey... their choice. I'm sure that ATA just transfers demands to its supplier who either implements it, asks for more money as it's out of scope or just tells them that it's very complicated to implement... You might think that a company does things itself because it seems a trivial task, however out there in the real business world it may be a lot cheaper to buy solutions from elsewhere even if they seem like money thrown out of the window to an university student.
Jackson - that's completely irrelevant... I'm not saying the devs couldn't do more changes, I'm saying that based on the information they have given us over the last 5/6 years on this app as well as other ATA developed apps that it would make sense if they didn't make the changes themselves and simply hired somebody to do it for them. I don't doubt that people could learn the languages to change their own personal forums but maybe it takes longer than half a day for those who aren't as tech-savvy as yourself. Basically, yes forums are easy to make if you know what you're doing but chances are ATA just hire somebody to do any major tweaks for them and they're not going to put the money into unnecessary things like quoting
the cheaper it is the more profitable it becomes. every programmer is different and many of them specialized. for me it makes sense to outsource something if u can get it done cheaper
Then you must be well aware that the forums are likely hosted on a separate server. Therefore, you are also aware of the work involved with networking in-between the servers the requested code that ATA probably doesn't feel like implementing in their game. It's such a small thing, theres really no point in putting the effort into it.
You should of read the post above your long winded retort. It was quoting kawcom proving everything you said about outsourcing and what not was completely wrong.
Not saying I'm better than him, he is probably 10x greater than I am. But that doesn't mean I don't have experience managing different forum boards. Both phpBB and vBulletin. Never really tried Xenforo.
Some layouts look similar to vBulliten. Just looks a bit more powerful in terms of flexibility and things you can do with it.