Started long before we launched a blog and Twitter existed, our ancient PHPBB2 based community supported forum has finally been retired.
The forum was used mostly for product release announcements and received only occasional posts for community assistance, which with our emphasis on QA, thorough documentation and designing for ease of use, was always the aim. Our support helpdesk has always been the best way to get official help if it is needed, and nowadays we also produce tutorials on our blog and make use of sites such as Twitter and YouTube, so the role of the forum had fallen away.
A further decisive factor was that it used PHPBB2, a flawed PHP 4 codebase that for security reasons we had isolated to its own server and modified to work with newer generations of PHP, but despite being made more secure and spam resistant with custom changes, this was still something that really should not be used. Hence the final decision.
We may reintroduce a forum with modern features in the future, but our current focus and priority is on product updates and other content. If you have suggestions for tutorials, product features or any other queries, you can contact my email directly at ben@ioncube.com
