First off, how was your Thanksgiving? Mine turned out great if you take out the dangerous driving conditions that developed. Some lake effect snow formed over Lake Erie and as I was traveling through the snow belt on the turnpike, things became dicey at times but I managed to bring everyone home including myself, in one piece.
As for the blog. Sorry I haven’t been doing my regular rounds of postings. This holiday week has screwed me up in terms of getting things done. I am hoping that starting Monday, I can get back on track and start delivering the content you guys want. However, I did manage to get one thing done, that being the forum.
As mentioned in a previous post, I have made the switch from PHPBB to VBulletin forum software. VBulletin in my eyes, is worth every dollar. It’s a powerhouse of forum software that I hope you guys will enjoy as much as I will. At any rate, I managed to find a somewhat related forum theme that looked good called RedandBlack developed by GFXStyles.com. I’ve also installed a few plugins such as the Top 5 Stats plugin which highlights Top Statistical areas of the forum near the top to help keep us all abreast as to what’s happening on the forum. I’ve also installed a GIVE THANKS plugin. If you have any forum experience what so ever, you’ll know that people make forum posts all the time that only contain the text THANKS or THANK YOU. Instead of creating a post or replying with a thank you, you can click the 
button which will thank the user for you. This will help keep the forum posts on topic and should aid in keeping the discussion clean.
Other features of this forum include the Subscription options. As a registered member of Forum2pt0, you’ll have the ability to subscribe via email in a multitude of ways. For instance, you can subscribe to a particular post, to a particular thread, to a particular forum topic, or to the entire forum. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe to the entire forum via RSS to keep tabs on new posts, click on the following link and add it to your FeedReader.
I’m also working on installing a mod that let’s you add your own blog’s RSS feed as a part of your profile. This will display a link to your last blog post that is shown to the public on every post you make. If I can successfully install this mod, I’ll be sure to remove the “NoFollow” attribute.
The forum currently covers the broad topics of Blogging, Technology, Jeffro2pt0.com and general Chit Chat.
Over time, I’ll be adding bits and pieces to the forum such as an arcade. What’s a forum without an arcade? Overall, the browsing and posting user experience on this forum is leaps ahead of my previous PHPBB forum. I hope you’ll agree as you check out Forum2pt0 – A Forum About Stuff and register your own account. Be sure to stop by the Feedback Section of the forums and let me know what you think.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 
Jeffro, I’m loving the new forum! It looks sweet. I’m already digging it much better then the other forum. Just out of curiosity, how long did it take you to customize it to your liking?
@John Kolbert Thanks John. Glad your having a much better time with the forums. Honestly, it didn’t take me much time at all. Once I found a forum theme that I liked, that took care of most of the work for me. It was a matter of installing the theme, then changing a few things to personalize it and boom, that part was done.
Because I’m familiar with the forum software, it took me maybe a half an hour to go through all of the settings to configure the board. Then it took me about 20 minutes to create the forums and ensure they had the proper permissions.
I failed to mention in my post that for the forum rankings, I used the Web 2.0 Job Titles as my forum rankings. I thought that would be interesting.
At any rate, after I had everything completed to my liking, I installed 2 plugins for the forum which I already covered in the post up above.
I did manage to find a wordpress plugin that I could manually add to my theme which is nothing more than a syndication plugin. I configured the plugin to display the forums RSS feed so that I could easily display the most recent 5 posts on the forum. I think it came out alright.
I’m curious. What is it that you like with this forum that you didn’t like about the previous version?
It’s not so much that I didn’t like anything of the previous version, but I have been enjoying Stats that are on the top of the current forum. That’s where I found both topics I posted about. Also, the layout is much nicer and seems less bloated then the other version.
Of course, it costs more then the free version, but I think it was worth it.
@John Kolbert Yeah. Being able to see everything that is going on within the forums at a glance is a nice thing. The most enjoyable thing I like about these forums is the AjAX that is everywhere. AjAX just makes browsing and managing the forum a breeze compared to the PHPBB way of doing things.