[admin (no pm's please)]

Well not really that new, but there is no question that the management system has got itself a little bit strained lately.

It lacks an ability to fully manage the transition between phpbb2 and phpbb3, and to deal with a few other circumstances that it should know about and alert a forum to.

It comes down to "only" storing 32 flags bits that are passed between a forum and "management". 32 sounds quite a lot, but they have all been grabbed for one thing or another and anyhow don't deal with the fact that a phpbb2 and phpbb3 forum will coexist in different states.

Another job on the TODO list.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Decided to fast track this one. From now on there will be five flag fields.

phpbb2, phpbb3, owner, forumtype, advertising

That should cover a lot of ground. No point in doing this and then finding we are still short of detail later on down the road.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Major "headache" on this so far is dealing with the fact that there maybe phpbb2/phpbb3 forums running in parallel as people are sloppy/slow/misinformed about finalizing the "upgrade".

The approach I am taking is that all info recorded about a forum will get stored separately, but actions taken on forums will treat the forums as a single account, e.g. if you are letting a phpbb3 forum be spammed whilst it's phpbb2 forum is running clean, a suspension will hit both versions This is a bit "tough" but reducing the complexity of the system and can only happen if a forum admin has been basically doubly incompetent. e.g. running a phpbb3 forum without properly completing the task in the control panel, and then letting spammers run riot.

There will be new warnings shown at the top of a forum if a forum is being accessed on a temporary "slarti3" type link indicating a forums upgrade has either not been completed or the admin does not understand that the link is a temporary one.