Why aren't we using standard forum software?

Don't take this the wrong way, but why did you (the site developers and maintainers) decide to re-invent the wheel and write the forum software from scratch, when there's so many options for fully-featured forums for download? My favorites are the two classics phpBB and vBulletin, but also good is SMF (Simple Machines Forum) and countless other alternatives. With no offense to the devs, just about each and every one of the other options would be more convenient than what we have today. This isn't because the current forum is unusable (it's not unusable), or because the devs are bad (you're not!), it's simply because the for-sale (and even free) forum software packages have had plenty of time to mature, they are feature-complete, been tested, tweaked, been made convenient, comfortable, and intuitive. There is no reason to try and slowly catch up to what is today considered standard features, when it'd be comparatively easy to install some third-party forum and have all the features ready and usable immediately. There are forums that can be integrated into an existing, bigger user system and don't require their own separate sign-up. I will be honest, the design of this forum deters me. It's hard on the eyes, it's hard to know what's old and what's new, what you've seen and what you haven't. All these and more have already been solved, there's no need to re-solve these issues. I really don't want to be all negative and criticizing, so let me just say that this site is fantastic and I love the fact that the community around this game is so talented and awesome to create a hub like this. It's just the forum - a fairly huge part of the website - that I, for one, don't think should ever be written from scratch in this day and age.

"I, for one, don't think [forums] should ever be written from scratch in this day and age." How else are major improvements going to occur?

If we're going to be quite honest, I very-much enjoy the simplicity of the site. Not to mention it loads much faster on mobile for me. For a large community I can see where it could have issues, but with the relatively small community we have here, I think it works quite nicely.

Since we're a website dedicated to programming, we thought it'd be cool to write everything from scratch. Sure, we probably could have created this website in a week using premade software for forums, chat, history, pages, etc. But it was about the principle of the community, and why we're using some ancient language like BASIC to make games from scratch rather than use a framework like Unity to make games like everyone else. Why are we whiling away our time on something with SUCH a niche audience and which is so ridiculously tedious to design on, when there are other alternatives which are both easier and have a much larger potential audience? It's for the same reason we made everything from scratch for the website. If there are features you'd like, I wouldn't mind adding them over time. I know it's silly, but using SmileBASIC is also silly, so let's all just be silly. The forums are hard on the eyes.... OK, no problem! I can try to redesign them a bit; what makes it hard to read? Making threads show up as old or new is a simple heuristic which we can apply without breaking the internal format of the current forums. Whatever you're most unhappy with, we can work on first.

I love this site and the fact that you guys cared enough to make it from scratch. The chat is a great feature. Its much easier than refreshing forums hoping to catch some useful information and sometimes I even like to switch over to the "off topic" tab for a laugh. Keep up the good work.

I love this site and the fact that you guys cared enough to make it from scratch. The chat is a great feature. Its much easier than refreshing forums hoping to catch some useful information and sometimes I even like to switch over to the "off topic" tab for a laugh. Keep up the good work.

Thank you very much! I'm glad you like it!

I really like it too! This website is extremely well done and people would hire for stuff like this

Since we're a website dedicated to programming, we thought it'd be cool to write everything from scratch. Sure, we probably could have created this website in a week using premade software for forums, chat, history, pages, etc. But it was about the principle of the community, and why we're using some ancient language like BASIC to make games from scratch rather than use a framework like Unity to make games like everyone else. Why are we whiling away our time on something with SUCH a niche audience and which is so ridiculously tedious to design on, when there are other alternatives which are both easier and have a much larger potential audience? It's for the same reason we made everything from scratch for the website. If there are features you'd like, I wouldn't mind adding them over time. I know it's silly, but using SmileBASIC is also silly, so let's all just be silly. The forums are hard on the eyes.... OK, no problem! I can try to redesign them a bit; what makes it hard to read? Making threads show up as old or new is a simple heuristic which we can apply without breaking the internal format of the current forums. Whatever you're most unhappy with, we can work on first.

Well, color me convinced - when you put it that way I can't bring myself to oppose :) The first thing that screams out to me is how the grid background is visible underneath so much of the content and text. It looks bad and makes it just a little bit harder to read and keep track of where you are. I think text background needs to be a solid color. Besides that, I'm writing this on mobile. I wasn't logged in at first which I didn't realize, so when I tapped the quote button on your post... Nothing happened. The button exists but doesn't do anything. It took me two refreshes and a few minutes to realize what was going on and why, so I think you should pop-up a login screen when someone tries to do an action which requires it. Chrome on Android. Thanks so much! ^^

Sure, I can fix the Quote button problem. As for the clear background, I'll ask our front-end developer about it. I agree, without a solid background for the content, it makes things kind of hectic.

I like the grid background myself but then I haven't seen what it would look like without it. My preference when it comes to web design has to be the simpler the better. Big companies like to hire people to make their home page nice and fancy and then their site's just completely bloated and unconventional.

Sure, I can fix the Quote button problem. As for the clear background, I'll ask our front-end developer about it. I agree, without a solid background for the content, it makes things kind of hectic.

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the forum view; the thread view is fine. I just noticed that the white background is a liiitttllee biit transparent, but it's not noticeable normally and doesn't affect much. In the forum view though, where you're looking at a list of threads, it's definitely hectic.