The matter of a message board comes up here from time to time. It’s also been mentioned during chat, and I figured you should understand the situation.

I’ve wanted a forum from the start. My original choice was not WordPress, but software called Drupal. It had a package of features, including a message board.

While I was getting a handle on it (Drupal had a steep learning curve), though, Dale took a look “under the hood”, and didn’t like what he saw. He had some issues with security and overhead, and a couple other things.

We went around on it, but eventually I gave in, and my second choice, WordPress, was installed. Unfortunately, WP is pretty stripped down, and comes without extra features.

So to add anything new, you have to find a third-party plugin. That’s not always easy, especially as there weren’t many board mods out there. We do have one possible, but Dale has yet to give it a thorough checkout.

I know what you’re thinking: why not just put up a separate board? That’s exactly what I want to avoid. A separate board would mean a separate login. And not many would want to login twice on the same site.

Inevitably, traffic would move to the boards, and the blog comments would die out. I don’t want that to happen.

If we were still on open comments, a separate board would be feasible. Unfortunately, that just puts far too many spambot posts in the moderation queue, and was why I had to require login for comments. We still get some spam posts, but they’re few in number (much fewer) now.

So that’s where we are right now on the message board matter. You want one, I want one, we all want one. I bug Dale periodically about it. And one of these days, I hope, we’ll have a message board. Meanwhile, we make do with what we have.