I have been thinking about the future of the site for the last few days, as it is currently nothing really fits together. Phpbb was meant to be used as a temporary thing, that was almost a year ago !
I'm pretty much thinking of a complete redesign, here are some of my fragmented ideas:
Some of you may remember my forum software, XHBB, we will use that instead. I'm currently working on it as part of another project and all of the features that we would need are in place.
New styling for the site that would better integrate the forum. In reality the rest of the site will be made as a plugin for XHBB so it should be very linked.
Pages should be largely the same, possibly adding a tools section for useful things like that database test data generator that I posted a while ago.
Improvements to the video viewing system implementing the new YouTube API and hopefully making it easy to use for once.
Premium items section will stay but will finally have some free stuff and better documentation for everything.
Scheduled competitions and an automated way of handing submissions.
Better organisation of the banners page.
Detailed and relevant profiles, since this is a web development community there should be a way for people to easily show off the sites they have made and stuff like that, not just their name and location.
I'd love to get any suggestions on any of this or anything I could add too so please let me know I also considered live-streaming it in some way since I have always wanted to do that for something
I'm one hour in the future (hello past-people) but one hour isn't a big deal, I've been wanting to livestream stuff myself but I only have a 1Mb upload... Don't think anyone would enjoy such a laggy stream...
It seems like you have this very much thought out already, and I'm very excited to see where this leads A livestream sounds like fun, if there are means for everyone to communicate properly ( a 250 px wide chatroom is not a proper way to communicate ). One way streams are boring.
It's actually quite useful, without it I would never have known when someone replied to my tweets. Let's be honest, who checks their email every 20 minutes...
I do. I also have Gmail notifications on, so I get a horrible beeping sound and a popup on my pc as well as my phone and samsung tablet whenever I get an email. Which is often. Sometimes it sounds like a concerto of email-notifications.
Having another annoying beeping sound going off every five minutes would definitely drive me nuts.
My thought for livestreaming would be to use google hangouts. They are actually pretty clever if you ask me.
/Edit, unless they still have that pesky nine people cap, of course.
Well, duh. You only need one annoying popup. I turned gmail off because YouTube keeps emailing me about uploads and what my subscribers like and I can't turn it off.
No need to worry about timetables I'll be doing this over the course of a weekend (week if it gets any bigger than it is already) so it will be ~36 hours long. fun fun ! I'll also try and record and edit it into some sort of timelapse thing for the YouTubes if I can find enough hard drives for 36 hours of uncompressed video.
I think I will be doing the streaming using my current site instead of twitch.tv so depending on the number of watchers I should be able to provide a decent bandwidth and nice chat area. None of this is worked out yet though
I would love some ideas for the tools section too ! So far I have the database generator and a password generator, boring !
I also considered live-streaming it in some way since I have always wanted to do that for something 
