@Marc Stridgen Thankyou for your reply.
You could well be right about .htaccess. I'm using IIS on Windows 10 on my home PC and haven't had to fiddle around with .htaccess to set up my current XenForo forum, or the test XF forums, regardless of location, so it didn't occur to me that this could be a problem here. I'll have to look into it, thanks for the tip. Confession: I've not really properly looked into the funcionality of .htaccess since I didn't have to, so I have a bit of a learning curve here, but don't tell anyone! 😛
Re the post numbering: because it's a PITA that really irks me. I can't see a good reason for it and it would stop me running my current competition of the winner receiving a prize for making the 1000th post in the competition thread. If it ever takes off, I want to make bigger versions of this competition, with a thread of perhaps 10000 posts one day, which hopefully won't break the server, lol.
So, a bit more on why this bothers me so much.
Besides the forum competition, I personally find post numbers very useful for tracking up and down a thread of any length, especially when it goes over several pages as I'm always referring to previous posts as I read through a thread and make mental notes with the post numbers to refer back to. Without it it's hard to find the posts to refer back to and gets confusing, especially when a thread is several pages long. It's not just a matter of getting used to it as an important function for me is missing.
Yes, while soft or hard deleting posts does affect the numbering (just double checked it on my forum with a test thread in a private area) and also with visibility eg mods v regular users, this isn't a make or break deal and I haven't seen it be a problem on forums generally since people normally post a permalink to the post anyway, so I don't think this is a reason to remove post numbers, at least not in such a permanent way.
I'd be grateful for your rationale for removing post numbers and why you won't offer it as a switchable feature in the ACP. Googling this removal, there are clearly a lot of people who are missing them over the last decade or so, hence I can't understand why you won't give customers back something that they clearly want, is so easy to implement and was actually implemented in early versions anyway.
I get that the developers of IC may not want post numbers for their own reasons on this site and I don't have a problem with that, but why force this preference on your customers who are many and varied? That's the whole point of making fully featured software that caters to the widest audience.
I hope this discussion convinces IPS to bring post numbers back, but unfortunately, I'm not holding my breath as it's been gone a decade now.
To be fair to you, I find frustrating design decisions in just about every product, whether it's forum software, other software, CPUs, cars, buildings you name it, there's always some odd quirk that makes me scratch my head, so I'm not picking on you in particular. It's just life, lol.
I was using IP.B about a decade ago when I was an admin (not owner) at a now defunct site and in fact, I bought the license quite cheaply from the owner when he decided to quit running a forum (more phool him lol).
I don't remember exactly which IP.B version he was running at the time about a decade ago, but it had post numbers then, which was fine and I liked the ACP and general functionality of the software. I remember how fully featured and advanced it was even back then, especially all that fine grained permissions goodness, which is why I bought the license. I've been meaning to set up my own forum ever since, but alas it didn't happen until last year because of one thing or another.
In my case, I can just walk away from IC over this, because the forum solution that I have is pretty good as it is and I was just looking to improve the site further, especially when it comes to the implentation of articles / blogs which is a weak feature of XF, has bothered me from day one and increasingly so as time goes on.
Also, I'll be honest, part of the reason I settled on XF even though I just had to renew the IC license is simply the ongoing cost, since, while I can meet the twice yearly renewal costs of IC, it's still quite a lot of money for me and especially so now with the rising cost of living here in the UK.
However, recently I wanted to play around with IC on my home PC without spending any money to get a feel for the product and be able to compare that old version with the latest available via the demo, but as the original files I had (v3.4.6) got corrupted over the years, I bit the bullet and paid for a renewal or my license purchase would have been for nothing.
Big shout out to @Matt for giving me a one-time $50 renewal discount without me even having to ask for it when I private messaged him over at The Admin Zone a while back about these damaged files. It really helped me out and great marketing! 🙂
Finally, I find it fascinating how all this advanced functionality fits into a smallish 19MB archive. Very nice. If this was a Windows app with equivalent functionality, I'll bet it would be several hundreds of megabytes in size.