It would help greatly if this forum software would index posts by poster.

The new forum software will do that on the main pages though for now every member has the last ten posts they made listed toward the bottom of their profile page. You will need to check the title and the dates though as the dates aren't (and due to the way the original forums were developed) can't be put in date order. Again with the new forums this will be sorted out.

every member has the last ten posts they made listed toward the bottom of their profile page

Thanks, I hadn't noticed that. Hadn't scrolled that far down.

Are you migrating to one of the standards, such as phpBB or vBulletin?

Are you migrating to one of the standards, such as phpBB or vBulletin?

Short answer is no. Long answer is that either of these (or most) out-of-the-box forum content management systems will run on Windows servers without special software and some would probably not work at all.

Snitz is a very good forum system for Windows and I have used this elsewhere in the past on a general chat forum I used to run however there are two issues:-

It is very difficult to incorporate off the shelf software into the custom environment that this site is and expect everything to work and the look and feel to match correctly. The other issue is security. All out of the box web software, regardless of whether it is a forum, weblog, directory, shop, etc is open-source, where anyone can download and read the code. It is easy for a competent hacker to do this and search for vulnerabilities in the software and then try and exploit them.

Whilst no website in the world is 100% safe from hackers, if the source code remains unique there is a better chance of remaining secure. I've designed the look of these forums to be a bit like Snitz but have a priority on keepig Vintage Radio and Television as a one-off.

vBulletin is probably the best off-the-shelf forum package available. I am a senior moderator on a forum run by a mate of mine that is powered by vBulletin and its security and feature set is about the best there is. Features on the whole of the content management system I am working on to replace this site will exceed vBulletin's feature set to a fair degree as I am using that software as a benchmark for what I plan to roll out.

My biggest enemy as far as web development goes is time. I am a manager where I work and this often requires me to hang back after hours and do call-out work at the weekends. Whilst I'd planned to replace this site long ago things have got in the way although that hasn't stopped development work completely. At the moment I am working on the core of the new forums and will be building the rest of the site around that. I have holidays coming up at the end of July and this will help a bit too.

^ seems like a heck of a lot of work.

Also seems we have hijacked this thread. Is it possible to move this discussion to a topic in the "General" section?

In the long run the new site will have more features yet contain half the code of the existing site. A lot has been learned since Vintage Radio opened in 2003 as a personal website with about ten static HTML pages.

The hard bit is that ASP.NET is a very strict programming language and is not as forgiving on sloppy code or mistakes as the Classic ASP environment is.

I rolled out the original forums in 2005 in about nine or ten days - I must have had an adrenaline rush at the time!

Screenshots of the old sites and a brief timeline are here.

I'll move the last few comments tonight or Saturday Morning. Even moderators are stuck in the bronze age at the moment as 'moves' are done manually on the database.