Ah, our western neighbor. I invite you to join! Btw. edited in the rules and principles and stuff on the first page.
The whole, learn the ranks!!! Then all the ranks are in German, and unpronounceable unless you know German.
It would deter me :D But I guess it hasn't stopped all those other guys from joining, so I must just be lazy.
If looking for a quick solution that requires minimal programming and high stability, I might suggest using SMF + Joomla/Mambo - there are two bridges I know of for SMF + Joomla/Mambo, I'm playing with one right now. Joomla is a decent CMS - not the best IMO, but its easier for the non-developer. Drupal is perhaps the best in terms of speed, scalability and reliability, but its admin interface tends to be less flashy and more spartan. Drupal is the best CMS, from a Dev's standpoint. The only killer on Drupal is the lack of an embedded forum system worth a damn. There is a SMF + Drupal bridge, but it isn't as well designed as the Joomla one is. All in all, when looking for forums...I was in love with PHPBB3 RC1...then I played with SMF again and I've pretty well settled on SMF (worth noting is SMF seems to want to imitate vBulletin in its functionalities, and does a decent job at it. Its major advantage over PHPBB3 is a module management area.) SMF has more ports to CMS, as well as being a release build. But even if you choose SMF and want to switch to PHPBB3 later on, its very easy to port your users and posts over. If you want me to expound on my views of PHPBB3 vs SMF...then ask here or over some other medium.... Both Drupal and Joomla/Mambo have good Theme systems out of the box (much like PHP's Smarty engine) and its not THAT hard to make a good unique theme for these systems. Between Joomla and Mambo, Joomla seems to have a larger support base...and more modules. Example Joomla sites are Abit's site, and I think O|NE uses a bad looking setup of Joomla as well. Drupal can be found on mozilla.org as well as the onion. At all costs, avoid Nuke and all of its derivatives. They ALL suck. Period.
Names could get long and confusing. The abbreviation makes it more obvious that they're ranks, instead of a part of a player's actual nickname.
Ranks should always be abbreviated IMO....then have a key for them somewhere. Esp German ranks. German words get so long since words are formed by stringing other words together. Take unterwasserbootjagdflugzeug for example. Well, that one is silly...I think it needs a space in there, or a hyphen....
JJ45, if we take the Joomla! + SMF route, I can help there, I have a decent amount of experience with Joomla!, alot with SMF, and have done the bridge a few times before.
If you mean the old SMF bridge that was listed on the SMF website, it's gone for now. SMF is actually copyrighted, saying that you cannot release code without the dev's express permission - they did it to avoid corporate influences. In the long run SMF is just as free as PHPBB or Joomla, but they (They being Joomla and other open source stuff) adhere to the GPL standards for open source software; GPL read as being literal, and even so adding in your own interpretation, it CAN mean that you cannot use GPL software to interface with non-GPL software. Hence, the Joomla devs told SMF to take its bridge down; the second SMF/Joomla bridge may also be disappearing soon. Joomla just cut off its nose to spite its face; they killed the only serious forum that could be bridged to Joomla, and have nothing to replace it - not even PHPBB3. This in mind, the Mambo bridge is still up, and Mambo has confirmed they have no issues with it. IMO, GPL needs to unfuck itself. I like open source, but I'm sorry, open source can and IS used in conjunction with close source. Every fucking day it happens. By Joomla's reasoning, open source software shouldn't run on Windows since Windows is closed source.
Ah, another clan! We still need more tho, best of luck JJ and the rest of [Ü]. On a sidenote: Might be a bad idea to have ^dee^ as a webgirl, seeing as she's scottish and the lot of them are mad drunks 6 days of the week
