We've done it before, and we'll have to do it again. As some of you know, this forum doesn't display very readable on a mobile browser. With the rest of the site now working so well on handheld, it's time for the forums to follow suit. For those of you who only visit here via computer browser, here's my post about making this site mobile-compatible: http://www.danbirlew.com/mobil.....ress-blog/ While it's non-essential info for most of you, it does contain some images of what the site looks like on mobile. At the end of the article there are also some facts about the growing mobile segment of Internet browsing. I'm sure you'll all agree that it would be best if the forums functioned as well as what you see in those images, which they do not.

To this end I've downloaded the full Vanilla Forums install, and I'm investigating how to import all our members and posts into it. You can read all about Vanilla Forums here: http://vanillaforums.org/features/mobile This link goes directly to the mobile features page, which I'm sure you'll all agree would make for much better mobile browsing of this site. Click on the other links to see what other features the forum provides. You can also visit working Vanilla forums in action, there.

There's basically one question I want to get answered: I know that Vanilla can import data from Simple : Press (our current forum) and phpBB (our old forum). What I'm trying to figure out before I take a dive and catastrophe strikes is whether I can import BOTH. Imagine having all our old posts again combined with all our new posts? And better forum integration on a more-readable page, for both regular browsers as well as mobile. I have posted these queries to the Vanilla Forums community and answers may take a few days.

The benefits of porting the forums over outweigh the pros of sticking with this one. For instance, Twitter and Facebook instant signup is going to make it much easier for outsiders to register and post immediately.