I think the theme that's used by the ElkArte forum looks nice and fresh and clean. If it's the default then I'd be happy with that. Less admin for the admin too.
Glad you like it, I also prefer keep things simple to administrate.
There is also an issue that you can't post within a certain time after your last post. Probably to stop spam-bots but it can be annoying sometimes.
You cannot post in the same topic after a certain time, or you cannot post in every topic after certain time? Anyway it's a something set by the admin, from default SMF does not work in this way.
Discourse allows you to create related- or sub-topics that let people take part of an argument as a "side bar" to the main conversation. I'm not quite sure how it works but it could be useful here as many threads can become crowded with some people talking about something specific that doesn't really matter to the main issue. I do this frequently. Maybe I shouldn't.
As far as I know there isn't something similar for elkarte, but could be requested, and if there is much interest could be created as separate addon.
My concern about migration is that if the storage of attachments moves to a by-person level, rather than the current by-topic level, (and I'm not saying that it will) then the total size of attachments may blow the limit for some people. For example, say there is a 10MB limit for the attachments that a person can upload. If the someone has previously attached six 2MB files (one in each of six posts) then, if the attachments are moved to the person - rather than the post - then that 12MB would break the limit and something would have to be dropped. It might not be an issue, I just thought I'd bring it up.
The attachments in elk are working in the same way they work on SMF. The attachments limits are not set by users or membergroups but by number of attachments per post or by some global settings set by admin.
It has been done a lot of improvements for attachments in elkarte, there are addons to auto-resize the images to a certain resolution, an addon to use smush.it loseless compression, and the limits are only those set by your host.
When I upload attachments I see:
- on my forum
Restrictions: 20 per post, maximum total size 1,048,576 KB, maximum individual size 524,288 KB- on this forum
Restrictions: 5 per post, maximum total size 4096KB, maximum individual size 2048KB In this way I can upload photos from my smartphone and we know that nowadays every smartphone make big photos in terms of size, at least 2-3 MB. Nobody will resize photos in external applications, especially if we are talking about a forum with people with a certain age.
ex: I can upload 5 photos for a total of 20 MB or more, but on forum host will be saved 4 images for about 170-200 Kb per photo. I set to resize images at 1200px width and 85% quality.
On my forum I have 11.106 attachments for a total size of 1.650 GB, not bad I'd say, so space should be no problem, especially nowadays when hosting is very cheap.