I have slowly been testing out ways to migrate the current forums over to phpbb3 for the last couple months. The main problem was getting it integrated with the rest of the site which is run on a heavily modified phpnuke. Also there are MANY problems with converting the large CKA forums database.

I have finally found a solution to have the phpbb3 forums integrated with the rest of the site. Meaning you only need to register once and login once, like it operates now.

I still have a couple other things to figure out, but very shortly I will be doing the upgrade, hopefully this week or next. The upgrade will probably take all day, the database migration will probably take 8 hours itself. So I will have to shut down the site for a day, that’s why i'm giving a heads up. I will also give another warning the day before. I will post some links on a temporary page where members can hang out for the day if they can't live without their CKA

Because many parts of the site, like "News Links" commenting is integrated with the forums, I have to shutdown the entire site, to avoid any problems.

Assuming everything goes well, the site and forums will be back and functional with all their phpbb3 glory. But many of the features on the current CKA will be missing. I am going to start the new phpbb3 off fairly stock, for awhile, to make sure there isn't any problems. Then once it all looks good, I will start adding things back, like medals, reputation and ext.

The result will be a more modern forum, phpbb2's codebase is super old now. Phpbb2 has tons of improvements, most under the hood. Which should result in the forums being faster and able to handle heavier loads. There will also be new features with phpbb3, most of the major ones are for the mods and the admins, major improvements there.

There have been some lingering bugs on the forums the last couple months, i hanv't spent much time to fix them, because i knew this was coming. So this should also fix up all these bugs, like the birthday/age problem.