I have launched a new forum for my school because of my new student elected position and was wondering how Kerm got the user wordcounts on this site, I have not seen something built in for that in PHPBB3 which I am using and I am looking for a way to do this. I would also like ideas on what a good student website would include for communication out for messages to the student body many of which are not tech savvy, for communication inside of clubs to announce and discuss things, and for other student discussion, I already have a web based mailing list system, a forum, and a web based calendar but I think it might need something more.

twitter.

Despite the one-word post, Ult Dev'r is correct. If you make a Twitter account and have all the students follow it on their phones, they can get texts about events, etc. As for the wordcount mod, it was something I found and made better, but it's basically an extra column in the users database, some extra code in the view topic / view post template, and some extra code in posting.php.

I doubt that more than 25% of people who will use this know what twitter is to any reasonable level and I am trying to keep this central to the one site so that there is one destination to get information and we control it, though I like the SMS idea I should look into adding a system where people can enter their cell number and I will send alerts through a gateway. Another minus for the twitter idea is I will not be the only one adding information, clubs who want to use it will add their own data to the site through their limited user accounts. On the word count subject, do you know the name of the mod or if there is a PHPBB3 version in their mods database, I looked through all of them for what might be useful I think but I didn't see one.

Fail.

People are far more likely to know how to use twitter than phpBB3.

I know that but I think it would be good to have a forum for centralized discussion anyway and it is something I can help with easily so it is an additional thing people have to learn and it decentralizes data, though come to think of it I should see if any open source micro-blogging platforms can send to SMS, I know there are other platforms like laconica but I am not sure if they send SMS out, I know they can't receive.

EDIT: I was reading http://gitorious.org/statusnet/mainline/blobs/master/README and I think that Status Net (The new name for laconica) will do what I need including things I didn't realize could be done for free including posting by SMS

EDIT2: I am still looking for additions, by doing what I needed I meant replacing twitter with a system on the site that we control. It will also interface with Facebook so my existing competition (Facebook) will not be as much of an issue.

Somehow, find/build a mod where people must sign in to this phpBB using there FB account. This way it'll prevent people from creating aliases and second accounts to harass.

I know this method exists because some sites allow users to sign in via facebook to post comments. Find this implementation then build off it for phpBB3.

You can do it through the Facebook API for developers, and that's not a bad idea at all. Nicely thought-out, comicIDIOT.

What if some of the people don't have Facebook accounts and can't/won't sign up for one?

I don't think I want to use Facebook connect for many reasons one of which KeithJohansen mentioned. I have been working on setting up the microblog with an interface to both twitter and Facebook so that posts on my site can be sent out and once this is on the school owned server I might try the bidirectional capabilities but they require daemon running and I am not allowed to do that on the current server. I think it is already bidirectional on Facebook though due to how they do it.

As far as getting items onto Facebook, you could use one of the phpBB RSS mods and import it on Facebook as a Notes feed...

Retards.

In what way?

Kerm, I already have an RSS mod installed, how would I add it to Facebook. I don't have much idea on how to use Facebook because I just created my account today and only really because of trying to mess with an app so that users can send stuff to and from Facebook for the microblog I am trying. (Same story with Twitter.) Also in rereading the TOS I was less sure I couldn't run the scripts that were questionable so I am asking support about if they can be run so that I don't have to find another always on computer with PHP-CLI to run it on. Also does anyone know how sending a SMS to an email address works? I have read things that suggest it is possible but never how it works on the phone end.