Apathy Sketchpad

I have, of late, been writing my own forum script, which I intend to use on this site and am considering releasing as open-source because I’m not selfish. So as such, the new forum is now officially open at http://forum.apathysketchpad.com.

It features no admin panel, because they’re too easily hacked and in any case I prefer to hack the database in PHPMyAdmin and hack the behaviour in the PHP files, so I’ve made all the code as readable and abstracted as I could to make this easier. It also features fully native support for all kinds of cunning levels of sticky threads, closed threads and Anarchy Boards that just aren’t possible in most forum scripts. It’s based heavily on the CMS I made for RealVG, and it takes a very different approach to most forum scripts, not least because I don’t see the point in spending a lot of time producing something that already exists. It’s very well suited to small site run by people who know their way around PHP (such as this one), but less well suited to large sites with many staff members (as they’d all need FTP and PHPMyAdmin access to administer it) or sites run by people who don’t know their way around a web server (because they’ll not be able to set it up, not least because there’s no installer at the moment). Since it has no admin panel, no session IDs (cookies are required), and checks your password on every page, it is, as far as I know, totally secure. I’ve little doubt there’ll be a hole in there somewhere, but keeping things simple and well abstracted is always the best way to keep them secure, and I think I’ve done that fairly well.

Other features I intend to add are email thread subscriptions, Facebook style user “walls” and the ability to email users who say they don’t mind (but not private messages because I don’t see the point), and some kind of file attachment system. And a “forgot my password” link, because they’re always useful. Also there are a lot of extra fields like “edited by” links that will need adding to the skin.

So feel free to register and post there, but do bear in mind that me and Testing Jeff will just spam mercilessly until the beta is over. And feel free also to request features and report bugs — that’s what beta is for. Such reports should be in my email inbox, comments on this post, or in the special beta test subforum.

The old forum will stay where it is indefinitely, though it won’t be reopened (for the forseeable future). I’ll update the various links later, and possibly put a notice on the old forum explaining where the new one is.