Hooray!
From what I have read in this thread, a lot of people are resistant to go to a "flat" type of forum, which is the nature of phpbb. I cut my teeth on Usenet and also liked the old "threaded" type of forum, which is what Scoop seems to emulate. There are advantages to a threaded forum, it's neat to watch threads spin off the original post and some coherency is maintained of the discussion. Flat forums are a different animal. I had a really hard time getting used to flat forums but once I did, I much prefer phpbb to any other forum software I have seen.
Probably 80% of my internet time is used browsing forums. Four or five of the forums I visit use phpbb. It's almost becoming an internet standard and people will come here already knowing how to use the bbcode to insert images, quote previous replies, make avatars, etc.
Believe me, I used to be an old-school forum guy. Text only, if you please. We don't need no stinkin pictures, what's an avatar?, no stinkin yellow smileys for me.
I have changed my tune.
Here is what I believe is the crux of the matter. Broadband is becoming the standard. Limiting pictures to 150k is an admirable goal, in a world of dialup users, but hardly anyone has a slow connection anymore. I swear, I held out till the last. I've NEVER had a windows XP system, still using 2000, if that's any indication of my mentality, but I finally got broadband about 18 months ago. limiting picture size to 150k is 2002 mentality.
Another thing... Why do you think places like facebook and myspace are so popular? I think it is because people are allowed to express their individuality through pictures and music and videos and all the other neat stuff broadband internet has to offer.
I was incredibly frustrated about a month ago because I wanted to quote someone in my sig and the quote was over 150 characters or something and I couldn't use it, because of Scoop. I want to be able to express my individuality here with pictures and quotes and yellow smileys. I want an avatar, I want a sig, I want to be able to EDIT MY POSTS for spelling and grammatical errors if I catch them right away.
This place can hang onto Usenet standards if it wants to, but look what happened to Usenet. I believe if it's not dead, Google groups has it on life-support. Maybe just the fact that there's great information here will continue to draw new viewers. But what if some of the guys who post the great information here toddle off to more fertile grounds? Avatars and sigs and flat forums and pictures over 150k can be fun. I want to have fun in here.