I'm usually tracking the whole forum by email notifications. However, the vanilla setup of phpbb email notifications is more than awful:
- The subject contains a useless 'New Topic Notification' or 'New post notification' or private messages instead of the real topic name.
- The sender name (not the email) doesn't show who wrote the new topic/post/pm.
- The email is not related to the freeorion.org domain.
- The content of the email is some meaningless babble instead of the actual message.
- The links to maintain the subscription or other further actions are part of the content, not of the email signature.
- Post attachments are not attached to the email.
- When not logged in the link to new posts leads to the login form. When removing the e=<number> parameter one can see the post.
Another beef I have with the board in general is the usage on smartphones. The layout doesn't even remotely fit into the viewport, making pinching and scroll necessary. Also writing posts is a chore, because 'Save draft' seems to be the default handler button if I jump to the next control which of course leads me to a confirmation dialogue I never wanted to visit. Also links are generally to small to 'click' those properly with a touch input. Also it seems like “ (Quotation marks(?)), which are not the same as " (Also quotation marks(?), I'm not to accustomed to typographic difference between those two), are not allowed as parameter grouping sign in phpbb syntax which makes me need to copy and paste those from other places when composing replies on the smartphone.