As you can see, we're back on our old forum system, PHPBB. We had to move away from it at some point when technical things started to get broken, but all seems to be working fine now. It's generally safer and easier to use than MyBB, so fingers crossed for less bots, more ease of use and nothing breaking down.
First and most importantly: if you're experiencing any technical difficulties, it's best to contact me directly. The A-team might end up not being able to help you and forward your message to me anyway. This includes the following:
- E-mail verification doesn't work (although the A-team will be able to manually verify your account)
- I can't sign up! Something must be wrong with the bot protection.
- I see weird blue icons and color schemes, is this normal?
- the forum seems to be acting weirdly (this is very important information as it was what clued us in to problems with PHPBB a few years back, so please let me know ASAP so I can investigate)
- I get error messages.
- Can I be masked? (It's not called masking, by the way, and if you read below, you can do it yourself now!)
- I can see X forum that I shouldn't see.
- I can't see X forum that I should see.
- I can't send PMs (or something similar)
You might find the following PHPBB features from the good old days useful/familiar/noteworthy
- There are special profile fields for constituency, XP and traits so you don't have to clutter your sig.
- You can request access to your usergroups yourselves! The A-team can appoint party leaders as group leaders so they can approve your application. Just go to your user CP (click on your username), go to usergroups and request to join your party. Please note that this only goes for the Tories and Labour - you can't add yourself to the LDs.
- You can give yourself that nice party colour! Do this by setting your default group. Go to your user CP, select the usergroups tab and you'll see checkboxes before some of your usergroups. Click one of them, then click the "Set default group" button. Your name should now be coloured up all by itself!
- There's a [lex] template that is a special BBCode for writing bills on the forum.
- There's [lab], [con] and [ld] tags for outputting the party colors of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
- Please note that the editor isn't WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), so you'll have to format your posts with BBCode.
- The forum is reasonably mobile friendly.
- You should be able to change your own username in the User CP. Please do not abuse this feature.