Like the old forum, but functional…
There has been a Forum on the RetireJapan site almost since the beginning. Over the last three years we’ve clocked up almost 1,000 posts on 167 topics.
It’s a wonderful resource to ask specific questions or run ideas past the RetireJapan community: should I buy this product? What kind of taxes does this entail? What should I be thinking about when looking for insurance? Is this a good asset allocation? Do I need bonds in my portfolio?
Unfortunately, the forum software we were using was disappointing. The biggest problem was that it was very hard to tell whether there were new posts and no way to receive notifications about people answering your posts. In practice you had to log in and click on each topic to check for new posts.
People were frustrated, and no-one more than me. The content was great but the forum software was getting in the way.
Finally I had a look at alternatives, decided to try phpBB (a common forum software solution), installed it and started trying it out. I also started the process to move RetireJapan from its current .info home to a new .com one (apparently .com is easier to find through online search).
We’ll finish that process at some point this year, but for now the new Forum is here, and you can register and start posting immediately. New accounts are on probation until they post three times (your posts are moderated and you can’t send private messages) but after that they get unlocked.
I haven’t found a way to import the old forum content yet, so we will be leaving the old forum up as a reference for now.
Please go and register on the new Forum, and start posting your questions, comments, and advice. The more people are on there the more effectively we can help each other.
What blog software are you running?
Weebly 🙂
Considering going to WordPress for the new site. I’d like to have some way of showing old or popular posts on the home page.
Actually, I’ve been steering people away from phpBB for some time now. It has quite a lot of fundamental security risks (could be better now but php is a hard language to get it right). It’s also quite administration-heavy, nobody has that time any more 🙂
Nowadays when people want good discussion board, I just tell them to go with https://www.discourse.org/
Some people do even their managed one (but those are the people who don’t have to save for retirement… grr…:) )
Thanks for the info, TL. You’re a couple of weeks late unfortunately 😉
Hadn’t seen Discourse before. Someone else suggested Slack, which I use at work, but I couldn’t imagine using it for a forum.
I’ll see how the phpBB goes for now. Liking it so far.
Yeah it’s not like you’re now locked forever to one product 🙂
If it works for you, all good then 🙂 If you want to experiment on the side, give a discourse a quick kick on the tires (also integrates with wordpress… 😉 )
xenforo should have been a top choice. Not sure of cost, but tokyocycle.com and jref.com both use it.
It’s the best I’ve seen/experienced.
Proboards is a very distant second.
A bit beyond our budget right now 🙂
-thanks for the suggestion though!
Xenforo is prohibitively expensive for a group of people looking for frugality 🙂
As far as security is concerned for phpBB: the vast majority of security concerns with phpBB come from its numerous mods. People who just keep a vanilla install and don’t forget to update should, in general, be safe.
Of course no piece of software is safe from hacking, but for many years people have been recommending some paid software to replace phpBB: vBulletin. Turns out vBulletin has had serious security issues for a while, and many high profile forums got their users Credentials stolen in the past few years, running on VBulletin.
I’d almost argue that security concerns about phpBB could have originated from paid software companies that don’t like it having such a huge share of the “forums” market…
I’m not saying phpBB is 100% secure. I’m saying it might be as secure as paid alternatives.
Disclosure: I have been running phpBB forums for the past 12 years.
Thanks, SB! Now I know who to go to with questions 🙂
Don’t think I’ll be doing anything funky with the installation…