Two months ago (almost to the day!), I announced on the blog the possibility of a forum for Empty Movement. The reception was impressive enough that...well here we are! I've gone through quite a bit of drama for this project, which culminated in moving the entire site to a new server. The lesson? PHPBB CAN EAT ANTHY'S COOKING AND DIE.

phpBB was the software I initially built the forum on, since it had the ideal feature set and was the most popular one out there. It took me a month and a half of working every. single. day. to set up the forum, including a full blown custom template. About three days before I launched it, a couple people informed me that upon attempting to visit the site, their Norton anti-virus went off. WHAT?  HAX0RD. Yep. I moved the whole site to a clean server. And I canned phpBB for punBB. punBB is a very lightweight, kinda unknown forum, and it has a fantastic reputation for being nearly bullet-proof. I had to manually mod the ever-loving crap out of it to get things like Easy BBC code (those buttons on the post page for inserting bold/img/etc, as well as the smilies) and private messaging. For now, there are no polls, as the poll mod wouldn't work.

Anyway, the point of this thread. Some of you are new to forums and are used to Livejournal and whatever else. Here are the features:

- Smilies. Duh. Yes, there are masturbation smilies. With characters like Akio (rawr), I figure this is necessary in any full-featured SKU-oriented forum. There's also a Freud smilie. Almost at necessary.
- BBC Code. You can use a quick button to insert brackets for bold, italics, etc.
- Image posting. At the moment there is no feature for hosting images, you have to keep them on your own server. KEEP THEM TO A REASONABLE SIZE IF YOU'RE INSERTING THEM INTO THE POST. To do so, you use BBC Code:

[img]URL OF YOUR IMAGE[/img]

See? Easy. If you don't have a place to host your images, try http://photobucket.com or http://www.imageshack.us/.
- Private messaging. Everyone can send and receive private messages. Use it how you will! (Also this is the preferred method of contacting the admins.)
- Search. You can search threads by keyword. Nice function, eh?
- Profiles. You all like having profiles, right? The Deeper... section can be expanded if there's anything else people would like to say about themselves.
- Avatars. You all get your own avatars. Making them is your responsibility, except in exceptional cases of image-editing ignorance. PM Giovanna with a request image and if I like you, I'll probably make it for you.

If you have any questions about how the forum works, feel free to ask. Most importantly, enjoy!

Now a little happy dance because I'm done coding this miserable thing!