The forum, its present and its future

PolarityMan

To totally change the subject...ground up write of forum software seems like a pretty herculean effort and with no offense to you @digitalscream are you sure that one person is ever going to pull it off to get quality / feature parity with the main established contenders. You're only one guy after all!

You'll remember at the time I argued pretty heavily against vanilla in favour of something more mainstream for the same reason.

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

To totally change the subject...ground up write of forum software seems like a pretty herculean effort and with no offense to you @digitalscream are you sure that one person is ever going to pull it off to get quality / feature parity with the main established contenders. You're only one guy after all!

You'll remember at the time I argued pretty heavily against vanilla in favour of something more mainstream for the same reason.

Heh...this is starting to turn into a "Right, I'm gonna prove all y'bastards wrong..."

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.

RandallFlagg

A decent search function with ability to sort results would be welcome

Funkfingers

Seems to me that more Ignore List slots might be welcomed by some.

digitalscream

RandallFlagg said:

A decent search function with ability to sort results would be welcome

Yep, top of the list of functionality to improve. I've already got a good candidate for a back-end engine (solr).

Funkfingers said:

Seems to me that more Ignore List slots might be welcomed by some.

That's another thing which will want improving - the ignore functionality isn't really that great in Vanilla.

Emp_Fab

monquixote said:

Please don't say stuff like that because should he decide to cause trouble again he will find posts like this and report them to the police.

I've edited my post.  I'm surprised you quoted me though ! - Isn't that just repeating it ? LOL.  Can you edit yours ? @monquixote ;

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.

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

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.

Except more of your sanity maybe?

Boromedic

Good on you @digitalscream ;for taking all of that on mate, seems a lot for one guy to manage so fair play to you. Such a shame about TTony, seemed like a decent bloke who had to deal with a lot of bollox on here at times.

Welcome back @WiresDreamDisasters , everyone deserves a second chance and nice to see you get the opportunity. 

duotone

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 ;

fastonebaz

Looking forward to the future of the fretboard @digitalscream .  Features I'd like to see improved:

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.   

axisus

Sounds good to 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. 

Stavros

Boromedic said:

Good on you @digitalscream ;for taking all of that on mate, seems a lot for one guy to manage so fair play to you. Such a shame about TTony, seemed like a decent bloke who had to deal with a lot of bollox on here at times.

Welcome back @WiresDreamDisasters , everyone deserves a second chance and nice to see you get the opportunity. 

This sums it all up for me, plus it’s great to see the various offers of help if needed.

Be great to see the improved search function as others have discussed, and @digitalscream has prioritised.

Onwards and upwards!

fob

I'll add my very best wishes for the re-tooling of the forum - it sounds like a mammoth task, don't let it overtake your life.

As for Drew coming back, I'm not bothered but can see why there are so many dissenters. As a relative 'outsider' on this forum I don't really keep track of the personalities behind the avatars (axius, digitalscream, tttony, octotonic, empfab & stickyfiddle are one amorphous blob in my head) but Drew did stand out. I had no personal interaction with him but there did seem to be an awful lot of threads where a spoiled teenager would spit as much bile as they could to get attention. There was also a double-standard applied to him with regards to policing his posts - I think this is actually where most of the animosity from other forum members came from.

I, for one, don't think the posts should be policed (other than actual criminal activity) but that should apply equally to everyone. There is one restriction I would place on him though - with names like WiresDreamDisasters and TacomaBridgeThingyThingy - don't let him name the YT channel.

Lastly, regarding my comment about the amorphous blob - I would suggest that a nice little addition to the re-tooled forum would be that a thread's original poster is indicated as such throughout the thread (very common on a lot of forums). Perhaps not seen as necessary for a lot of the mainstays but for newer members and those that aren't here as much it is surprisingly helpful. Maybe a suggestions box (thread) in Help & Feedback would throw up a few good ideas as well.

bingefeller

Welcome back Drew. I was thinking you might have choosen @Drew_Peacock as your new handle.  

UnclePsychosis

Sorry to see @ttony leave, all the best Tony. 

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. 

Sporky

fastonebaz said:

A "report abuse" type button to help identify unpleasant interactions. 

Already got that - the "flag" button next to the posting time in a post's header. 

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. 

digitalscream

UnclePsychosis said:

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... 

Nobody's ever accused me of rock-solid sanity. I simply attribute it to the job I've inherited here...a little bit of history for you: I was only part of the admin team because, when monquixote, Sporky and Tony decided to break ground on this place, they needed server space and I had spare capacity. I think that's the very definition of "Not what I signed up for"

Sporky said:

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.

Chuffola

ICBM said:

Sorry to see TTony leave, and happy to have Drew back. That's all really...

Wot he said. To which I'd add - good luck @digitalscream !  A lot to manage for one guy - hope you get a lot of offers of help. 

monquixote

digitalscream said:

UnclePsychosis said:

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... 

Nobody's ever accused me of rock-solid sanity. I simply attribute it to the job I've inherited here...a little bit of history for you: I was only part of the admin team because, when monquixote, Sporky and Tony decided to break ground on this place, they needed server space and I had spare capacity. I think that's the very definition of "Not what I signed up for"

Sporky said:

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.

OK, Geek mode ENGAGE!

I was the one responsible for choosing Vanilla and it was without a doubt the best of a bad lot. Forums aren't really the thing these days so most of the software around is old and a bit crap with the exception of Discourse which was still in Beta when TFB launched.

As regards the writing from scratch thing it will be a massive amount of work, but there is one very substantial advantage. Vanilla is an extensible forum framework which means it's full of hooks where you can add additional functionality. This leads to a situation called overgeneralisation where the logic and data flows are so abstracted that you can't easily follow what's happening for example when the page renders you might have any number of "pre render hook" callbacks firing and then the page will render and any number of "post render hook" callbacks will fire. This is made worse by using a dynamic language like PHP where you can't even get the IDE to help you with what's going on. The overgeneralisation problem is made worse because Vanilla is badly architected with "leaky abstractions" meaning the various plugins (which should be isolated) interact in unpredictable ways meaning one plugin will often break another one. 

This situation is so bad that last time I pitched in to fix a bug it took me 3 hours to make a 1 line code change because it was so hard to work out what was getting called when and in what context so I could figure out what was actually causing the problem. The same applies to the Database schema which of full of random extension tables.

A solution written by@digitalscream will not be all things to all men, but simply the functionality for TFB and nothing more.

RoR is also considerably cleaner than PHP, but is unfortunately completely outside of my experience (Node, Java, Go, Elixir) so I won't be able to help out easily

Chalky

Ha! Now that Drew's coming back, any other member can act like a right tosser and rightfully claim the "Well you let Drew return!" defence.  And if you don't let them off they will quite rightfully claim bias.  Your only truthful response will be "Well we need Drew but don't need you".  So much for egality and integrity?