I expect that more than one person shares your opinion, so I do thank you for taking the time to post it and allowing me to respond and try to clarify what’s going on. In a nutshell, the reason I set out to perform this comparision was to determine if there were user-facing features that were missing from my MODded board that would provide a compelling and immediate reason to upgrade. I had been saying (both in public and in private conversations) that I didn’t see a need to upgrade, but that decision was not based on any sort of thorough analysis. What was I truly going to be missing by delaying the upgrade?

The important words are “compelling” and “immediate”. I feel like the read-tracking feature of phpBB3 is compelling enough to be worth upgrading for right away, thus it was awarded a point in the first post in this series. But for searching, spam prevention, page security management, and other items… I am much happier where I am.

I am clearly aware that phpBB3 is technically superior in many ways. I have tried to include the disclaimer at the top of each of these posts to call that out. Still my board has been able to support four-digit numbers of concurrent users without impacting my server. The speed and efficiency improvements for phpBB3 are therefore not “compelling and immediate” needs. Bottom line: “scoring” is supposed to be a way for me to determine which is more important… the features in phpBB3 that I don’t have, or the features in phpBB2 that I’ve created.

Ultimately it’s an exercise in feature reviews and needs analysis, more than code quality and efficiency. Do I “need” to upgrade, or not? That is the question that I am trying to answer for myself, and only for myself. Anyone else could run though the exact same feature list and come to a completely different opinion as to their needs.

The reason I am doing this in public (via blog posts) rather than in private is I thought it would be interesting to see how important some of the features I dismiss might be to other folks, or vice versa. I don’t expect everyone to have my needs, thus I don’t expect everyone to agree with my assessment. In fact, I expect many folks to disagree… which sparks good discussions.

And blog comments.

Thanks for your thoughts. Hopefully I’ve made my thoughts behind the process a bit more clear. For now this is the last in the series that I have completed, and the next two weeks are more than swamped as far as my schedule, so the continuation and final analysis probably won’t be done until the end of September.

The reason is that I think that even though you have made some really good MODs for your install, there are still places phpBB3 excels in speed, how things are handled, and so on. Such as the caching that DavidMJ explained to you. I’m not trying to push phpBB3 on you, but I somewhat think you are a little biased in your reviews, that’s all.