Hey TJ,
Your welcome. And don't take my "bitchin" personally. I'll live with the changes because they appear to have been necessary, but 'so far' it does seem that the software is inferior to the old in several ways, particularly in terms of ease of discussion.
Another problem I discovered this morning. If you click a link in a message for an old Forntis post, like this one:
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=40#60164
it takes you to the forum index.
This makes many of the old posts pretty useless, as people often linked to the answer to something, rather than repeat it.
Will that ever change, or is that feature gone forever?
Well, I know what you mean, when you say "inferior". But I think a more accurate term to use would be "immature". PhpBB2 was total rewrite, from the ground up. The old version had so many security weaknesses in it, rather than just fixing them, the developers decided to just start over from scratch. There was one issue a while back, where phpbb was actually used to spread a virus.
This is only version 2.0.21, so really, it's more like a version 1.0.21. There are a lot of imporovements and feature enhancements, but there are also still quite a few bugs. Also, Ginger had been hacking and modifying the old board for about 5 years, so she had cutomized a lot of things, and those modifications were totally lost.
But no, nothing is lost forever, it's just going to take some time, and hopefully, things will eventually be even better than before. I'd really love to get directly involved with some of the development of the software itself, because I can see lots of things that need work, and there are a lot of features that could be added. But, right now, we're really busy, mostly with the things going on behind the scenes, related to the underlying systems that make everything work. I was fortunate to have enough free time lately, that I've been able to do pretty much nothing else except this for the past month or so.
I am aware of the issue with the old links, and I do think that's something else that is fixable. The variable names in the query strings have changed, so any links from the old board will just return a 404, File Not Found error. I just set things up to redirect those back to the main index, for now.
Anyway, like I said, it will take some time, probably not just days or weeks. But things will definitely get better.