Greetings from the design team behind AgTalk. Some friends and I have been working on this new format for months and we hope you like it.
The original AgTalk format, in June 2000, was created using Microsoft FrontPage. It was very cheap and easy to setup, very Spartan in appearance and function, and very difficult to administer. The volume of posting soon rendered it obsolete -- and the search was on for a replacement.
You might think, with all the forums on the Internet, that finding decent forum software would be easy. I literally checked out hundreds of titles and found serious problems with essentially every one of them. Most of them generated only in-line or "flat" boards, while AgTalk users had come to expect threaded discussions. Others would not allow HTML or file uploads.
Netbula's AnyBoard rose to the top as the least bad of the more capable forum programs. It was expensive and full of bugs in the early days. I spent more than a month trying to get it to work. In a sign of things to come, tech support was very poor and bug fixes were slow coming. Nevertheless, AgTalk II went live New Year's Day, 2001. It has been running, with some degree of success, until now.
Netbula is apparently a one-man operation. Judging by the utter lack of progress and support there, AnyBoard is at a dead end. That wouldn't be quite so bad if it ran the way it is supposed to. Archiving is busted, stability has always been poor, and if anybody knows how to get AnyBoard to talk to a MySQL database, please advise. To make matters worse, AnyBoard is licensed software so it stops working if you stop sending money to the guy.
We spent this last winter searching, again, for site software that would do everything we wanted in a forum. To learn more about the product we chose and what it means for our site, click the "Attn AgTalk users" navigation link on the left side of this page.