Hi guys,

Last night, I ended up with a copy of an RSS Aggregator for iPadico which seems to be working FANTASTICALLY for bringing news items into Wordpress.

While I can't really do anything about bringing people into PHPBB without having to spend hours and hours fighting spam accounts, I was wondering how each of you feel about the idea of moving Whyzzat to a "blog" type Wordpress page.

We all respond to threads anyway, so a news item is simply an extension of that thread idea. Moderation and everything means that you could post either by e-mail address (moderated) or by setting up a new account under Wordpress.

The current discussions/history wouldn't be removed, but we would have a Wordpress-driven style forum plugin in addition to them.

In the meanwhile, we could add RSS feeds and use keywords and filtering to bring in the news items (sort of like our own web-based RSS news reader) and then we could all jump in and comment on items without the need to really do a lot of work or hunting for stories.

There *would* be a little bit of work involved for me, and anyone who wants to volunteer to help approve incoming stories, but overall, I think it might help us out quite a bit as far as the "fresh blood" idea is concerned.

The only issue I see is getting Wordpress configured in such a way as to not trip the SFW filters.

I know you get tired of me asking these type questions, but I seriously need to know if you'd be interested or whether you might have other ideas or objections...

Please.

The key problem appears to be that people cannot sign up for user accounts right now. Do you really think this will change if the Wordpress engine is used instead?

By the way, Bill over at DFX uses SMF. (He had an Indivision forum a few years ago that was hacked.) He gets maybe 1 or 2 spam messages per month. (If you change the CAPTCHA settings from "strong" to "moderate", that number increases quite a lot, which happened earlier this year after an engine upgrade.) And yes, there are converters that allow to import phpbb databases into SMF. Maybe that is something you would like to experiment with...