Site donations were recently used to cover another three years of site hosting so barring PHP-Fusion crapping out on us we are all good for another few years.

OGM has been here for over a decade and is still going strong.

I must say, I STILL feel like the WordPress site of old was the best platform we have run on in terms of ease of use, commenting and visibility etc. It's just a shame it crapped itself as we got around 2000 files in the download database or we'd still be on it today. Then Joomla came along, I made the effort getting that running and it too started giving me problems adding more files even though its a genuine CMS hence the move to PHP-Fusion. Even that has its own set of niggles although those mainly tend to be around niceties that other platforms have but this doesn't and which long time members got enamored of only to find them M.I.A after the latest platform switch.

As always, I more than open to change if it means a better experience for members so if anyone knows or likes a particular site platform by all means have your say on this forum. Our hosting allows for unlimited domains etc so I am more than happy to evaluate migrating platforms if it means a better experience for everyone and we can run testbeds easily enough on my hosting plan.

Is WordPress worth reassessing? Is a genuine forum a better option? I've asked these questions before and received very little feedback but I thought I'd remind everyone again that OGM is a community and as such everyone is free to provide feedback and have a say ......

I know nothing of operating a website, so I'm just glad someone is taking care of all of the work of creating and maintaining a platform for releasing and hosting scans. I feel like it's not really my place to say what features I wish we had, since it's probable that such features aren't possible on the current platform and I have no idea what alternate platform might be better.

But yeah, if anyone out there has experience in this sort of thing, there are lots of ways other than scanning to contribute, so speak up!

My favourite forum platform has always been Invision Power Board, the admin interface is fantastic and it is also a pleasure to use as an end-user. The downside is the cost, it is about $150 per module (so 300 for both forum and download area) Although I would be happy to contribute some money towards it if there was interest.

I looked seriously at Invision Power Board a while ago as Retromags runs on it and again recently but the cost was daunting. If I hadn't just used the donations on securing another three years hosting I would've been tempted by that platform.

Without anyone talking about their experience as an administrator that lack of clarity on ease of use was what sidelined it as a potential platform for OGM. That and the fact Phillyman at Retromags said he pays a developer to mod everything on the site so I was wondering exactly how well the base package actually works

I looked into SMF forum again, after many a year, and saw it now has a plugin called TinyPortal which includes a download manager. This can be viewed at www.oldgamemags.com/forum

I have loaded a couple of Play Meter issues into the download manager as a test of the download facility.

Feel free to take a look at it. I have also created a couple of test logins if anyone wants to post a few topics on the forum and see if the forum/personal settings better suit getting notifications etc which I know has been a bit of a bug bear on PHP-Fusion. Credentials (user/password) are:

Joe90 / Thunder1
Tester / Thunder2

At this point I am not putting a lot of effort into it as this is just a test and I'd like to ensure the majority of people are happier with any other platform before considering another migration given the effort involved. At least this is free unlike IPBoard

Added a free version of Download Manager as an alternative to TinyPortal.

This free version is pretty basic but the paid version supports extra features like images, individual category permissions including member access etc.

The great thing with this forum is the ability to change the file ownership to a member so unlike every other platform I have used to date I can simply assign ownership to the scanner after I upload them and thus no longer would have to manually add "Scanned by: <member> in the description field. It also picks up the Mediafire size when parsing the file during creation so I also don't have to manually add that to the download page.

The only pain is the paid Pro version of the download manager is it costs $69 but I get that's a far cry from $400 for IP Board.