New Project: FatChatter.com

Because I never seem to have enough going on I’ve taken on a new project. I’m setting up and administering a forum at http://fatchatter.com/. This isn’t a site for people with weight issues, it’s a community site for people with varied interests who live in the Kansas City metro area. One of the other people I’m working with has built two thriving communities before so I think the team is up to the challenge.

I set it up using Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software version 1.1.4. I must say that I’m very impressed with the way they’ve gone about putting the package together and I anxiously await their upcoming 2.0 release. I may post more about this excellent package later.

I’m currently writing an open source modification that will allow the site users to basically create their own forum out of the site’s existing forums. It should be exciting. We’re calling it “My Forum” for now. I’ve written this feature set into a copy of phpBB a couple of years ago, and I must say that doing it in SMF is proving to be much easier.

After we complete My Forum I’ll be working on a comprehensive user ignore modification. I have some experience through writing CPIggy (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12975) about what an ignore script should do and the challenges you face when writing one.