Hi all,
First up, I want to make sure my intent in this is taken correctly. I'm not taking a dig at those who run and maintain this forum - they have their own lives and do this on a voluntary basis. This post is merely meant to discuss the technical issues and maybe find a way forward to prevent them in future.
There are a few areas of concern.
One is that the version of PHPBB in use (3.0.9) is almost 9 years old. The v3.0.x family of phpbb is no longer supported, and so any new security holes and bugs won't be fixed. It's probably long overdue an update.
Secondly, the site is sometimes down due to MySQL errors. Looking at the error codes returned, some of this seems to be down do the use of MyISAM as the storage engine. All recent versions of MySQL have moved to use InnoDB as the default as the continued use of MyISAM caused issues. I would recommend that the MySQL system backing the database is updated, and that it is changed to use the InnoDB storage engine.
Without access to the backing systems I can't tell - but I imagine that the versions of PHP and other scripting languages used by the site are probably quite out of date too.
There are also some idiosyncrasies baked into the site from the early ages - I seem to remember that quote chains are limited to 3 quotes so that the forum was viewable on early Blackberrys. Images that are larger than the width of the screen are merely cut off, instead of being made to fit the size available. Some of these probably need to come out.
Now again I appreciate that those who can do this don't have the time to help. I would be willing to give some help with this, and would be willing to share professional credentials etc with Limecat etc in private to show that I'm able to help with this.
Thanks,
FLIP