It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
You'll remember at the time I argued pretty heavily against vanilla in favour of something more mainstream for the same reason.
The thing is, I'm not looking for feature parity with any of the main contenders; I know what we need, and having been through all of the major ones, none of them really fit the bill in that they all involve compromising on quality, overhead, performance, ease-of-maintenance or money (or some combination of those).
As I've already said...forums actually aren't very complicated things. In fact, as systems go, they're really rather simple. With Rails, even integration with outside systems like Akismet and reCAPTCHA is trivial. The biggest problems are performance optimisation, caching and search - all of which are pretty much solved by various rubygems and sensible design.
Beyond that, the main issue is migrating data from the old database structure to something that actually makes sense. I've already made quite a few changes to the Vanilla database to facilitate that, and shifting that to Rails-esque naming conventions isn't hard, it's just a bit of a slog.
I don't even have to do any design work, which is where my skillset breaks down - I can just reproduce the HTML that Vanilla chucks out, and thus reuse the CSS that we already have (with minor changes where necessary).
As you can tell, I'm quite confident at this point. Ask me again in January...I may have changed my mind However, the point is that nothing's lost by trying it.
That's another thing which will want improving - the ignore functionality isn't really that great in Vanilla.
Bloody sad state of affairs where we have to be careful what we say about a criminal who has stolen from members and tried to wreck an admin's marriage too. Grrrrr.
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
Welcome back @WiresDreamDisasters , everyone deserves a second chance and nice to see you get the opportunity.
The yard is nothing but a fence, the sun just hurts my eyes...
1 Seems sensible, I guess time will tell how it goes.
2 Great! Sounds like a good idea & definitely worth exploring.
3 Looking forward to seeing this. On my iPad & Android mobile phone it never seems to work fully.
4 All good with me.
Cheers @digitalscream
Better search on mobile with date sort order and search operators
Saving of favourite searches and maybe alert notifications when they find new results
On mobile when navigating back to a channel from a thread it jumps to the top of the channel list instead of remembering where I was, would be good to take me back to where in the channel list the thread i clicked on was.
SSL
Maybe have the channel list as a side bar/ swipe from left of screen to aid easy navigation on mobile, on no wait that's only apps, ok maybe a more responsive web design with a burger menu for channel list navigation
A "report abuse" type button to help identify unpleasant interactions. Maybe some automated temporary restrictions based on exceeding a threshold. (With mod overdrive facility to undo bullying activity)
I think it's probably best hosting media on external sites and just have better ways to link to it so you don't need to get quite so involved with filtering out ex-girlfriend nude shaming images and the like.
More emojis.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Just a few random thoughts. All thumbs up from me.
Drew coming back .... hmmmn ... well, the 'good' Drew was an excellent and valuable forum member, the 'bad' Drew could be so unpleasant, I hated where he took things all the time. In my head I'm listing some of the bad stuff, I got very pissed off on many occasions - but lets leave all that behind. New ID, clean slate, fine by me.
Be great to see the improved search function as others have discussed, and @digitalscream has prioritised.
Onwards and upwards!
Have to say that as someone who knows a thing or two about writing and maintaining software I think writing your own forum from scratch is, frankly, mental. I wish you all the best with it but I can't agree that I think it's a good idea...
Not to be too much of a sour puss but why are threads like this hidden in off topic? I only found it by accident, like many others I'm sure I tend to avoid the OT sections these days. Big forum news should be in the on topic sections.
Anyway despite being a moaning minnie I would like to offer my continued thanks to those who run the forum. I don't agree with everything you do but I also don't put in the same effort---which is genuinely appreciated here.
Having inherited code projects myself, I am all in favour of DS's approach - write exactly what you need, using the language/environment you want, from scratch. It sounds initially like a daft amount of effort, but you end up with something you understand and can fix and modify.
Yep, this is it I'm aiming for a lean codebase which doesn't have any features that we don't use getting in the way.