In case ...

In case www.bbschinese.com is not working, you can give www.bbschinese.org a try. They are the same site but the .com is in the middle of DNS change and server upgrade. Despite the name difference, let's reiterate again -- they are the same site, so even when two sites are up, you won't notice any difference.

Service is Up, more to come

As some of you might have noticed, BBS is up. In the next few days, it will move to a more permanent location. There might be a little outage but we will try to avoid it as much as we can.

There is more work to finish for the new BBS, including uploading smileys, avatars, and the new gold coin ranking system. In the homepage, we are planning to have real-time news, and a small photo carousel, and some color clean up's ... The site is up, yet the improvement does not stop here, happy watering!

Setting up new Hosting Service

We have finally selected a service provider that we believe is reliable. We have gone through a few to see who is more promising and reliable. It is hard to judge the quality of the hosting service until you really go through the pain of getting them to set up the site the way you want. Some cannot set things right, some are not responsive, some say they would call you back but never rings the phone (doster.com, web.com ...) ... after all, we have taken the time and money to go through this because we want to avoid another downtime.

What a nice weekend!

There are quite some progress made this weekend. We are happy to see many responses in the blog. We are pleased by the encouragements from many. We also understand many are getting impatient and frustrated.

Despite some negative callings, despite the fact now armpits getting sweaty, there is a belief that all the sweat, hard work, sacrifice of personal times to rebuild this BBS from scratch would be paid off -- because no matter it rains or shines, ovations or sour notes, BBSChinese will be opened in hours.

Getting Really Close ....

We have chosen a finally platform where the future of BBS would be on. There are trade off's of each package, but we have settled on one that we can easily develop more features specifically for BBSChinese. This means the development of BBS won't stop even after the day it is launched.

Now we are wrapping up all the features, prepare the forums, make sure all the t's are crossed and i's are dotted. A formal opening day will be announced very soon.

Below is a sneak peak of the new logo, comments welcome!

What the FCK !!

Instead of monkeying BB code with the good old text editor, the new BBS would likely sport a new editor, making styling your message FCK'ng easy!

Experience It!

One Big Step ... (actually One x 2 Steps )

Well, it turns out we have two options of the new BBS to choose from, they are both built and in working condition now. We are evaluating to pick the one that serves the community in a longer run.

Sneak Peeks ...

Cannot express how much appreciation I have towards Lincoln's support. We are working to make the new BBS solid -- which means it will be more stable, speedier, and more visually appealing.

In the next few blogs, a few sneak peeks of some new features would be offered to give you an idea what BBSChinese 2.0 is going to be like.

Let me cut to the chase, here comes new feature 1:




The new forum is going to sport RSS support. RSS would allow you conveniently read BBS from your favorite websites or archive posts automatically on your computer. Many online companies such as Google and Yahoo offer RSS service, so you can collect posts of your favorite forums and read them in one place, there is also free software such as RSSBandit that downloads the posts and you can read the post even when you are not on the internet. It is almost like a TiVo of BBS.

The New Beginning ...

First and foremost, the team would like to thank Lincoln, the founder of bbschinese.com for his hardwork for the past few year. Running a high-traffic BBS forum is not easy, running BBS on top of other daily responsibilities at work is far beyond many's capacities.

Second of all, the team would like to thank all of you, the contributors of bbschinese. According to the latest statistics, all the posts have accumulated over 4GB of data, millions of posts. This is why we would like to continue BBSChinese, as it becomes part of our daily activities.

So, what is the next step? When is it coming? What can you help?

Although a precise date of release is yet to be planned out, we are planning to have the site up within weeks. The first release would have all the essential features, and each subsequent updates would gradually complete all the features.

We would ask you kindly provide us feedbacks as to the few features you like about the old BBS, and anything in your wish list.