Believe it or not, there's been a whole host of legal wrangling going on over two pieces of software we use to run this website. As a result there are changes to the forum, specifically how you log on.

The logon box at the bottom left of the website homepage used to log you in to both the website (for access to restricted content and mailing lists, etc) and the forum.

However for reasons that I explain below (if you're that interested) this no longer works. So the main website and the forum are now completely seperate.

If you regularly use the forum, nothing really changes but you do need to logon directly on the forum page. You'll notice the forum no longer looks like the rest of the website, hopefully this will be updated soon.

Go on then... why's this happened

To fully understand this you need to enter the murky world of software licencing. In a nutshell it's because Joomla (the software we use for the website) is released under an open-source licence known as the GPL. The Simple Machines Forum we use is released under the SMF licence. These two pieces of software were linked together using a bridge.

The people behind the GPL (the Free Software Foundation) say that if you're going to link something into GPL software, it has to also be released under the same, or compatible, licence.

And that's where the problem lies. These two pieces of software are not released under a compatible licence. Therefore the bridge that linked these two together has ceased development and is no longer available.

Because annoying people around the world are constantly trying to ruin websites, we have to make sure our website software is regularly updated and secured. Unfortunately the latest security update broke the bridge.

So that brings us to where we are now. And it looks like we'll never be able to go back to how things were, although one should never say never.... or so they say.

For now it means the forum runs seperately to the rest of the site. In the weeks to come I'll be looking at how best to make the forum work well with the rest of the website.

Webmaster