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What happened to the chat forum? The short answer is that the
YaBB 2.4 chat forum software that we started using on February
20, 2002 simply stopped working on December 11, 2023. However, shortly after the release of YaBB 1.0, YaBB's development team broke apart to create a second program called YaBB SE 1, which was released on November 12, 2001. The development and support team for YaBB SE was shut down in March 2004 with hundreds of communities in operation. That's when the developers joined the SMF project. A converter was developed to convert YaBB SE to SMF, which stands for the Simple Machines Forum. In retrospect, our site would have been better served had we converted our YaBB Gold 1.4 version to SMF, which continues to thrive. Instead, we upgraded our forum to the YaBB 2.4 version, which for us worked well. There were a couple of newer versions after that, but we continued to use the stable YaBB 2.4 version. Naturally, it was only be a matter of time before newer servers would make YaBB 2.4 obsolete, which finally happened to us. For a more detailed account, click/tap the following Wikipedia page: Will Great Feet install another chat forum? Not likely. After all, chat forums have gone the way of social media. That's where people want to participate. As an experiment, though, a phpBB chat forum was installed on Great Feet's sister site for any of you who want to see what it's like. You can check it out by clicking or tapping this link. Are you still going to show previews ahead of scheduled publication dates? Yes, previews will still be shown on our site's Previews Page. We had previously shown them in our chat forum. Are you still going to list a record of each contributor's history? Not likely. That's one of the things that we did in our chat forum when it was operational. That was mainly why we had it. Unfortunately, not that many people posted comments even though we had at last count 8,606 registered members. It was great to have separate topics to keep track of what contributors sent to our site. That way, people could easily scroll in one place to enjoy a particular person's contributions. For contributors who provide their name or online persona, or other identifiers like an email address, those contributions can be searched by going to our search page. Does Great Feet have a search engine? Not of our own, but as referenced above, we do have a really good search page that has two great search engines. Check them out at http://www.greatfeet.com/search/ |