You should use a different forum system. There are far better options besides phpBB.

I'm sure that the administration has decided that this system is the best one to use to make it easy on members to navigate the forum.

Dayzee, it might be best to avoid making such judgements that you really have no way of knowing. We'll get around to answering it eventually.

The real answer is a bit complicated and involves the fact that Rick is not a webmaster and that the person in charge of our forums is hosting us out of the goodness of their heart, and Rick would prefer not to impose too much on their rather busy schedule. Thus we're on an out of date phpBB.

^ What Obbl said.

The other issue is that things can get very messy when you swap between forum software. It's very easy to lose or even to duplicate posts. Speaking from experience here, having been an admin on a forum that did swap.

It's just a very time-consuming and involved process to make sure everything switches properly and Rick just doesn't have the time at the moment. Also, as Obbl said, we don't want to presume upon our hosts any more than necessary.

And anyway, as far as I can see, phpBB does everything we need it to even though it is a little clunky at times.

Can I ask what sort of features you'd like to see in other software that we don't currently have, Johnny?

All hail inaki the Server Sugar Glider.

There should be more board styles.

isn't that a pain to modify in this forum architecture though?

Add the ability to search a general term without specifying the author.

... That's already a thing. You don't have to fill in all the boxes on the search page, just the relevant ones.

can you make it NOT reject words for being 'too common'? i get how using one of those alone could produce a lot of useless results, but when searching for a sentence in 'find all words in the same post' mode, and half the words get rejected, it means i have to sift through 200 posts when only 3 of them would have actually contained the full thing.

If there is a way to do that, it would make things a lot easier for me also because I also search posts like that for...reasons.

I have a feeling that that may be hardwired into PHPBB unfortunately. I've passed that suggestion on to Diss and Rick though and they'll look into it. It's definitely a good suggestion if it's possible!

It's checking against a list of common English words (and checking that the word is at least 3 letters)

Why can't you search for words less than three letters? Because if you did that you would get a huge amount of results I'm assuming?

The trouble is that it would search fot every word in which the letters "lo" appear together and in that order, which is a lot of different words.

(I wouldn't get my hopes up on this seeing as I brought this up as an issue when Dissension asked what changes we wanted on the forums 8 1/2 months ago and nothing came of it).

I recognize that I might be wrong about this, but this is my understanding in layman's terms of why this is the way it is:
There is a server somewhere with every post and it's contents saved in order. To avoid having to expend time and processing power crawling every time someone uses a search bar, there is a separate list where for each word it records what posts used that word. Every time you post, in the second list it goes to each word you used in your post and adds in your post's id number. To save space so the index doesn't double the memory requirement, when it encounters a word that is fewer than three letters or on the list of most common words, it doesn't add anything to the index. Of all the choices, those words would have the greatest ratio of saving/usefulness from cutting from the index. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_indexing

I'm not informed enough to know if the trade-off is worth it, but I can guarantee that on the benefit side of cost-benefit, we would appreciate and take advantage of being able to use all words in the search bar.As it's set up now, it would only find every word where that the letters appear together in that order if you type wildcards (aka asterisks (aka *)) on either side.