Hi Guys,
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
We can either move the forums to forums.centos.org or export them behind a proxy at www.centos.org/forums ( I prefer the second option ).
Finally, lots of people seem to think that moving towards a serverfault.org type of interface is more 'these days' than a conventional forum setup. Thoughts ?
On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 10:50 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
If you are looking for a more support-style software (slim, minimalistic, easy to use), then it's Phorum + mailing list / NNTP gate integration that can be easily set up.
If it's more about community-type thing with stupid avatars, captions, rankings, etc. then you have a choice between IPB / vBulletin (paid for) or Simple Machines (free).
On 08/08/12 10:59, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 10:50 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
If you are looking for a more support-style software (slim, minimalistic, easy to use), then it's Phorum + mailing list / NNTP gate integration that can be easily set up.
If it's more about community-type thing with stupid avatars, captions, rankings, etc. then you have a choice between IPB / vBulletin (paid for) or Simple Machines (free).
Hmm, for whatever reason serverfault type forums have always tended to attract a lot of people and usually I've found good content/answers there. I have used stackoverflow, serverfault and possibly 2 others all with good results, so that may be an option. Not sure how those are setup in terms of software and licensing though.
I have maintained vBulletin 3.x at previous $work, and it's not always easy and straightforward to upgrade to a new version, especially when it's a major upgrade like from 3 -> 4. It was so much hassle to organise a group of people to test the migration that we never got around to it. Wordpress is not a forum but when it comes to upgrades, they make it dead simple. Their notification of new updates process is broken however as I only find out on twitter when there is a major security issue with it.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Hi Guys,
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
We can either move the forums to forums.centos.org or export them behind a proxy at www.centos.org/forums ( I prefer the second option ).
Finally, lots of people seem to think that moving towards a serverfault.org type of interface is more 'these days' than a conventional forum setup. Thoughts ?
I've always been a big fan of phpBB. It's open source and has a decent plugin system for 3rd party mods as needed.
Your last link seems broken (takes me to a "Welcome to nginx!" page), so I'm not sure what that is exactly.
-Jeff
On 08/08/2012 03:28 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
Your last link seems broken (takes me to a "Welcome to nginx!" page), so I'm not sure what that is exactly.
http://serverfault.com/ is what it should have been. apologies..
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 8:21 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 03:28 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
Your last link seems broken (takes me to a "Welcome to nginx!" page), so I'm not sure what that is exactly.
http://serverfault.com/ is what it should have been. apologies..
Ah, thanks!
I think something like that (Q&A type software) can be nice, but it is not great for a back-and-forth discussion about an issue; e.g. when people ask a more general question, or it's not a simple answer.
-Jeff
On 08/08/2012 04:30 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I think something like that (Q&A type software) can be nice, but it is not great for a back-and-forth discussion about an issue; e.g. when people ask a more general question, or it's not a simple answer.
So, are you saying that we could/should have a Q&A type subsite as well ? or should we not bother ?
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 04:30 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I think something like that (Q&A type software) can be nice, but it is not great for a back-and-forth discussion about an issue; e.g. when people ask a more general question, or it's not a simple answer.
So, are you saying that we could/should have a Q&A type subsite as well ? or should we not bother ?
I think having a Q&A type site should be in addition to the forum, not a replacement. That's assuming that people think the Q&A functionality is worth it. It may be that some forum software could be configured to have a specific Q&A sub-forum (or something along those lines), I don't know for sure. I'd be willing to research that some if needed.
-Jeff
On 08/08/2012 05:10 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I think having a Q&A type site should be in addition to the forum, not a replacement. That's assuming that people think the Q&A functionality is worth it. It may be that some forum software could be configured to have a specific Q&A sub-forum (or something along those lines), I don't know for sure. I'd be willing to research that some if needed.
go for it :) Let us not hold you back from doing a bit of research!
On 08.08.2012 15:28, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I've always been a big fan of phpBB. It's open source and has a decent plugin system for 3rd party mods as needed.
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Nux! nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
And how many years have they been saying that?
On 08/08/2012 07:51 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Nux! nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
And how many years have they been saying that?
Also, how many bits on the wishlist does it tick off ?
To get even basic functionality on phpBB you have to install lots of mods which is painful if you have more than one theme and/or need to upgrade it.
On 08/08/2012 12:57 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 07:51 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Nux! nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
And how many years have they been saying that?
Also, how many bits on the wishlist does it tick off ?
On 08/08/12 19:57, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 07:51 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Nux!nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
And how many years have they been saying that?
Also, how many bits on the wishlist does it tick off ?
See the matrix here:
On 08/08/2012 08:04 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
See the matrix here:
I was looking at that this morning, and it seems to have not been updated in a very long time. I guess your statement implies that its still accurate.
On 08/08/12 20:26, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:04 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
See the matrix here:
I was looking at that this morning, and it seems to have not been updated in a very long time. I guess your statement implies that its still accurate.
It's accurate as far as I'm aware, unless any work has since been done and not documented on this list. The wishlist hasn't changed.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:04 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
See the matrix here:
I was looking at that this morning, and it seems to have not been updated in a very long time. I guess your statement implies that its still accurate.
People who have been on this mailing list should all know that the "Forum talk" started long time ago and it's been a come and go subject for quite a while. The wiki page referenced was created back when the activity was still high but has not been updated since.
I hate to ignore what has been done in the past and pretend things are starting new. For example, it was considered, at some point, that phpBB was a good choice and a good amount of effort to migrate xoops to phpBB was made. I can list a few threads from the past (year 2008 to 2010):
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2008-June/thread.html#2846
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2009-March/thread.html#4188
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2010-May/thread.html#5565
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2010-October/thread.html#5915
Akemi
On 08/08/2012 08:37 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
I hate to ignore what has been done in the past and pretend things are starting new. For example, it was considered, at some point, that phpBB was a good choice and a good amount of effort to migrate xoops to phpBB was made. I can list a few threads from the past (year 2008 to 2010):
yes, and working on facts that are upto 4 years out of date is'nt ideal either. Its quite possible that software out there has evolved in the mean time.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:37 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
I hate to ignore what has been done in the past and pretend things are starting new. For example, it was considered, at some point, that phpBB was a good choice and a good amount of effort to migrate xoops to phpBB was made. I can list a few threads from the past (year 2008 to 2010):
yes, and working on facts that are upto 4 years out of date is'nt ideal either. Its quite possible that software out there has evolved in the mean time.
That is what I'm afraid to hear. It means the time and effort spent back then has gone to the waste land unless there is anything you can salvage (not savage).
Just hope the current thread does not follow all the past examples and die down...
Akemi
On 08/08/12 21:10, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:37 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
I hate to ignore what has been done in the past and pretend things are starting new. For example, it was considered, at some point, that phpBB was a good choice and a good amount of effort to migrate xoops to phpBB was made. I can list a few threads from the past (year 2008 to 2010):
yes, and working on facts that are upto 4 years out of date is'nt ideal either. Its quite possible that software out there has evolved in the mean time.
That is what I'm afraid to hear. It means the time and effort spent back then has gone to the waste land unless there is anything you can salvage (not savage).
Just hope the current thread does not follow all the past examples and die down...
Looks to me like the objection to SMF based on its license is now resolved though so that might put it back into consideration. I've been reading their doc and it seems quite comprehensive and SMF seems to have a number of supporters.
I'm unsure how many of the required bullet points it hits though. So far, I have yet to find any mention of LDAP support though I haven't explicitly looked for it. Hmmm, now I did and it seems there isn't anything officially supported but there is something that might work if hit hard enough.
All the other bullet points look like things I would just expect to find in an up-to-date forum software. The data migration might be the stumbling block since I get the impression that xoops/newbb boards are not exactly widely deployed.
T
hi,
On 08/08/2012 09:39 PM, Trevor Hemsley wrote:
in an up-to-date forum software. The data migration might be the stumbling block since I get the impression that xoops/newbb boards are not exactly widely deployed.
Last week I had a look at the code, and what it does to the mysql db at the backend. Extracting the forum's, their metadata and mapping that to threads and posts seems fairly straight forward. The actual Subject + message body in every case is extractable and linking that upto users is also possible. This is, the extraction process.
Importing this into whatever is the new system decided on then will need to be considered.
I think for now we can drop the ldap requirement, none of the other properties have ldap in place either. The point at which we move, all users will need to reset passwords. Worse case scenario is that they will need to do the same whenever we moved to a centralised auth layer ( which might still be a long way off ).
On 08/08/2012 09:10 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
yes, and working on facts that are upto 4 years out of date is'nt ideal either. Its quite possible that software out there has evolved in the mean time.
That is what I'm afraid to hear. It means the time and effort spent back then has gone to the waste land unless there is anything you can salvage (not savage).
thats quite a strange comment - are you saying that we should only consider software as it was back in 2008 and ignore the fact that it might have moved on since then ?
Just hope the current thread does not follow all the past examples and die down...
depends a lot on intention and the desire to fix something. If we make the effort and go through with it - I am sure it will happen.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:26 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:04 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
See the matrix here:
I was looking at that this morning, and it seems to have not been updated in a very long time. I guess your statement implies that its still accurate.
The SMF 'unfriendly license' is probably no longer true. http://www.simplemachines.org/about/opensource.php
On 08/08/2012 10:28 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
The SMF 'unfriendly license' is probably no longer true. http://www.simplemachines.org/about/opensource.php
In which case, would you be willing to undertake an evaluation ?
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 10:28 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
The SMF 'unfriendly license' is probably no longer true. http://www.simplemachines.org/about/opensource.php
In which case, would you be willing to undertake an evaluation ?
I'm really the wrong person to do that for a couple of reasons - one is that I dislike forums in general, and the other is that a local (Chicago area) system that I use runs SMF so everything it does would seem as 'natural' as forums can be. I could bounce questions to the guy who runs it or try some specific tests, though.
On 08/08/2012 11:03 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
I'm really the wrong person to do that for a couple of reasons - one is that I dislike forums in general, and the other is that a local (Chicago area) system that I use runs SMF so everything it does would seem as 'natural' as forums can be. I could bounce questions to the guy who runs it or try some specific tests, though.
Fair enough..
Might he share the top5 most irritating or defective bits of the software ?
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 11:03 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
I'm really the wrong person to do that for a couple of reasons - one is that I dislike forums in general, and the other is that a local (Chicago area) system that I use runs SMF so everything it does would seem as 'natural' as forums can be. I could bounce questions to the guy who runs it or try some specific tests, though.
Fair enough..
Might he share the top5 most irritating or defective bits of the software ?
The only real issue he mentioned on the admin side was dealing with link spam and he uses these plugins:
stopspammer - http://www.stopforumspam.com/ - http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1547 mod httpbl - http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ - http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2155
He says captcha doesn't work because now spammers are mostly paid humans...
He did point out that he doesn't have to deal with scaling problems - the two sites he runs are pretty low volume. Something larger might need caching tools or php accelerators.
On the user side, when you visit a forum, it's 'new' status changes at the top level even if you don't read all of the new postings (but they remain marked as new when you go back to that forum). This may affect the 'show all new postings results too - or at least there is some quirk that can make things you haven't read disappear under some conditions.
And from my use of the system the RSS feed only gives a few lines of a posting, not the whole article, so it isn't usable to read through google reader or other aggregator - but that might be configurable somewhere.
Hi,
On 08/09/2012 09:50 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
The only real issue he mentioned on the admin side was dealing with link spam and he uses these plugins:
I think that is something every website needs to handle - we will need to as well. At the moment its all manual, hopefully we can adapt and automate atleast some of the tracking + removal in the new system.
He says captcha doesn't work because now spammers are mostly paid humans...
nice
And from my use of the system the RSS feed only gives a few lines of a posting, not the whole article, so it isn't usable to read through google reader or other aggregator - but that might be configurable somewhere.
I believe this is tuneable in most systems these days.
On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 01:51:42PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Nux! nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
And how many years have they been saying that?
-1 phpBB
phpBB has one of the worst track records for forum packages with regards to security issues and they have, as Les mentioned, been promising to "fix" the heart of the problem for many, many years now. Quite a few years ago I grew tired of the "phpBB security hole of the week" game, transitioned everything to SMF, and never once looked back. I routinely turn down gigs that want phpBB if I am unable to convince them to go with SMF - it's just not worth the headaches.
John
On 08/08/2012 08:01 PM, John R. Dennison wrote:
phpBB has one of the worst track records for forum packages with regards to security issues and they have, as Les mentioned, been promising to "fix" the heart of the problem for many, many years now. Quite a few years ago I grew tired of the "phpBB security hole of the week" game, transitioned everything to SMF, and never once looked back. I routinely turn down gigs that want phpBB if I am unable to convince them to go with SMF - it's just not worth the headaches.
Is it possible to quantify this phpbb security issue ?
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:01 PM, John R. Dennison wrote:
phpBB has one of the worst track records for forum packages with regards to security issues and they have, as Les mentioned, been promising to "fix" the heart of the problem for many, many years now. Quite a few years ago I grew tired of the "phpBB security hole of the week" game, transitioned everything to SMF, and never once looked back. I routinely turn down gigs that want phpBB if I am unable to convince them to go with SMF - it's just not worth the headaches.
Is it possible to quantify this phpbb security issue ?
Yes, CVEs and looking at release history seems like a way to quantify it. As I understand it, this was really more of an issue with older 1.x, 2.x versions. phpBB 3.x underwent an external (to the phpBB team) security review, and as far as I've seen, they've not had a lot of problems since, and are pretty good/fast about addressing any potential security issues.
-Jeff
On 08/08/12 20:07, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:01 PM, John R. Dennison wrote:
phpBB has one of the worst track records for forum packages with regards to security issues and they have, as Les mentioned, been promising to "fix" the heart of the problem for many, many years now. Quite a few years ago I grew tired of the "phpBB security hole of the week" game, transitioned everything to SMF, and never once looked back. I routinely turn down gigs that want phpBB if I am unable to convince them to go with SMF - it's just not worth the headaches.
Is it possible to quantify this phpbb security issue ?
Sure:
http://secunia.com/community/advisories/search/?search=phpBB http://secunia.com/advisories/product/17998/?task=statistics
Looks like there's been 6 vulnerabilities (5 advisories) in the lifespan of the 3.x product (since 2008?). So just over one per year and importantly all have been fixed.
That seems pretty reasonable for a web based application to me. I was expecting it to be much higher than that.
In contrast, the current forum software (Xoops 2.x) has had 36 vulnerabilities:
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/327/
of which 8% remain unpatched. Oops!
On Wed, 2012-08-08 at 20:07 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:01 PM, John R. Dennison wrote:
phpBB has one of the worst track records for forum packages with regards to security issues and they have, as Les mentioned, been promising to "fix" the heart of the problem for many, many years now. Quite a few years ago I grew tired of the "phpBB security hole of the week" game, transitioned everything to SMF, and never once looked back. I routinely turn down gigs that want phpBB if I am unable to convince them to go with SMF - it's just not worth the headaches.
Is it possible to quantify this phpbb security issue ?
I see that the security issue risk has already been debunked but wish to ass my personal opinion. +1 for phpbb 3.x
I have been running 3 phpbb3 forums since 2009, and in that time have had zero problems with security issues. The admin pages warn you if you are not up to date and updates are easy. There has not been anything significant for quite some time. 2 of these 3 sites rank quite highly on google searches for the content in question, so they are visible.
The only mod I required was for a 'quick reply' box so that you could enter your reply without having to load the full blown editor.
Updates have been quick and easy to install, even to the point of automating diffs of the slightly patched theme and letting you review the changes. I have not had to reinstall my mod, despite the newer template patches being merged in.
Themes are plentiful (though many dont stretch properly to a wide screen monitor - a personal annoyance of mine) but its not hard to find one that does on one of the phpbb3 theme sites.
The app scales well, My three forums are running on a one old pentium 4 chassis, and one of the forums record a record of 50 concurrent users, yet the load monitoring shows cpu load rarely exceeds 5%.
It works well on centos 5 & 6 :D
It is highly configurable, I can confirm the wish list matrix is still correct. Its also widely used and supported - if you need to figure something out its not hard to find info.
Regards, Anthony
Hi all,
I am a sysadmin in isoc.org.il, lurking here for some 2 years or so, hardly ever posted. So Hi :-)
I have a little experience with phpbb3, which I thought would be insignificant compared to others here, but I see very few here actually talk about their own experience so I might share mine.
Some company developed a web site for us in 2008, and they chose phpbb3 as the forum software. IIRC one of the main creteria was Hebrew support, which is irrelevant for the centos case, but which obviously limited the choices considerably. It was a one-time contract, and I was to maintain it. Basically all was well. The main issues we had were with spam. Not sure how the CFA - Centos Forum Administrator - is going to take care of this, and I have a feeling that spammers are attracted to phpbb-based forums more than to others - so it might be an issue more than it used to be. In our case, we first installed recaptcha - quite recommended - slightly changing the anonymous posting policy and related stuff every few months, then writing some cron scripts that would alert us if they identify something that seems like a spammers attack, the common case being many new user registrations that did not post for a few hours or so - the assumption being that real normal people register to a forum when they want to post, later making these crons automatically delete these users, and eventually giving up, as the forums were basically dead - a few posts a year - and closing them for posting, later dropping them altogether. Noone later complained about them being closed, so we didn't bother spending more time and thought about this.
Making phpbb3 use recaptcha wasn't that easy, BTW - it was 4 years ago, but IIRC there are no real "modules", something you plug in and activate, as in e.g. drupal, but actually "mods", which are more like patches, with most of them, instead of being real diff files, are human-directed instructions about how and what to change. I might be wrong about this, but this needs to be checked prior to deciding.
On Thu, 2012-08-09 at 09:23 +0300, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: <snip>
Making phpbb3 use recaptcha wasn't that easy, BTW - it was 4 years ago, but IIRC there are no real "modules", something you plug in and activate, as in e.g. drupal, but actually "mods", which are more like patches, with most of them, instead of being real diff files, are human-directed instructions about how and what to change. I might be wrong about this, but this needs to be checked prior to deciding.
Recaptcha is in by default now. The built in anti-spam is updated regularly as required. I can advise working anti-spam off list, but I wont go in to detail here as its a cat and mouse game.
Anthony
On 08/08/12 20:01, John R. Dennison wrote:
On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 01:51:42PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 1:39 PM, Nux!nux@li.nux.ro wrote:
+1 phpBB
Has a large user base and (I imagine) developer base. The likely security issues will be promptly fixed. :-)
And how many years have they been saying that?
-1 phpBB
phpBB has one of the worst track records for forum packages with regards to security issues and they have, as Les mentioned, been promising to "fix" the heart of the problem for many, many years now. Quite a few years ago I grew tired of the "phpBB security hole of the week" game, transitioned everything to SMF, and never once looked back. I routinely turn down gigs that want phpBB if I am unable to convince them to go with SMF - it's just not worth the headaches.
SMF was rejected a long time ago on the basis of the license not being friendly. Please check back in the archives or refer to the matrix here:
http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums
Thanks.
On 08/08/2012 08:09 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
SMF was rejected a long time ago on the basis of the license not being friendly. Please check back in the archives or refer to the matrix here:
smf ver2 is BSD licensed. Would that not be acceptable ?
On 08/08/12 20:41, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 08:09 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
SMF was rejected a long time ago on the basis of the license not being friendly. Please check back in the archives or refer to the matrix here:
smf ver2 is BSD licensed. Would that not be acceptable ?
Why are you asking me? I didn't impose the restrictions on licensing. I couldn't care less what license the forum software uses as long as it's the best software for the job. I'd choose vBulletin if it were up to me. But I understand if others have a desire to use open source software.
So to answer your question, yes a BSD license is acceptable to me. But it's not my project.
If you have re-evaluated the restrictions on licensing and come to some other conclusions since that work was done then please do let us know :-)
On 08/08/2012 09:07 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
smf ver2 is BSD licensed. Would that not be acceptable ?
Why are you asking me?
were on a list - the question is to everyone on here - not to you.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Hi Guys,
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
What are described in :
http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums
are largely true today.
"The specific requirements raised by the present www.centos.org forum users"
- Multiple persistent logins: so people can login from multiple machines with the same username/password at the same time - Remember read/unread posts across multiple PCs/logins per user, not per machine - View first unread post within thread feature - Ability for users to change/edit their registered email address - Better management of subscribed threads
Personally, the major request is, as I asked multiple times in the past, that the existing links get retained in the new software. Forum posts are quoted externally as well as within the forums. If they stop working after the migration, it would be a great loss of information. Search engines like Google will eventually re-index the contents but the internal links/URLs will break permanently.
Akemi
On 08/08/2012 04:50 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Hi Guys,
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
What are described in :
http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums
are largely true today.
"The specific requirements raised by the present www.centos.org forum users"
- Multiple persistent logins: so people can login from multiple
machines with the same username/password at the same time
- Remember read/unread posts across multiple PCs/logins per user, not
per machine
- View first unread post within thread feature
- Ability for users to change/edit their registered email address
- Better management of subscribed threads
is there any software out there that meets all this specs ?
What are the top 5, most wellrun forums' around the world ( according to the forum admins ) ?
Personally, the major request is, as I asked multiple times in the past, that the existing links get retained in the new software. Forum posts are quoted externally as well as within the forums. If they stop working after the migration, it would be a great loss of information. Search engines like Google will eventually re-index the contents but the internal links/URLs will break permanently.
On 08/08/12 17:01, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/08/2012 04:50 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:50 AM, Karanbir Singhmail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Hi Guys,
Realistically, what are the best-of forum software out there at the moment ? And what are the top 10 items on the forums moderators wish list at this time ?
What are described in :
http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums
are largely true today.
"The specific requirements raised by the present www.centos.org forum users"
- Multiple persistent logins: so people can login from multiple
machines with the same username/password at the same time
- Remember read/unread posts across multiple PCs/logins per user, not
per machine
- View first unread post within thread feature
- Ability for users to change/edit their registered email address
- Better management of subscribed threads
I agree. We had these discussions ages ago. Nothing has changed since then from my perspective. The results of those discussions is summarised here:
http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums
is there any software out there that meets all this specs ?
Probably not - there are always compromises. That said, IIRC the options were evaluated and phpBB came out on top as most other serious contenders were eliminated based on their license conditions.
As a user the best forums I have ever used have almost exclusively been vBulletin, which has always been a non-starter for CentOS as it's not free/open source. Simple Machines is another that features quite highly but failed the license requirements. At which point you are really plucking solutions from towards the bottom of the tree.
What are the top 5, most wellrun forums' around the world ( according to the forum admins ) ?
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Akemi Yagi amyagi@gmail.com wrote:
"The specific requirements raised by the present www.centos.org forum users"
- Multiple persistent logins: so people can login from multiple
machines with the same username/password at the same time
- Remember read/unread posts across multiple PCs/logins per user, not
per machine
- View first unread post within thread feature
- Ability for users to change/edit their registered email address
- Better management of subscribed threads
But if you are looking for new users, as in people that don't like forums in general or don't like the current implementation, a good RSS feed would be a big plus. That is, something that you could plug into google reader or other aggregator and get the complete posting and a link to reply from your phone or browser without having to log in until you want to post or reply.
On 08/08/12 10:50, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Hi Guys,
<snip>
Finally, lots of people seem to think that moving towards a serverfault.org type of interface is more 'these days' than a conventional forum setup. Thoughts ?
That's not a forum. I've never heard anyone on the CentOS forums ask for anything like that. If others want it then that's fine but lets not confuse it with a replacement for the current forums.
That's like saying lets replace the mailing lists with twitter because twitter is more modern and popular "these days".
JMHO
On 08/08/2012 05:42 PM, Ned Slider wrote:
That's not a forum. I've never heard anyone on the CentOS forums ask for anything like that. If others want it then that's fine but lets not confuse it with a replacement for the current forums.
How would you define the difference in the Q&A style posts and a forum ? i.e what characteristics make a q&a interface not be a forum like setup ( and impact usability therefore )
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
How would you define the difference in the Q&A style posts and a forum ? i.e what characteristics make a q&a interface not be a forum like setup ( and impact usability therefore )
In my opinion, the Q&A type posts are really hard to read as a discussion and ask/answer multiple questions (like a discussion would) or have any flow aside from "here's the answer". You end up with multiple "answers" (potentially voted up/down), and then each of those can have some seemingly random comments below them. You don't get the ability to "quote" posts, or have a back-and-forth type discussion such as you would be able to do with most (all?) forum software, and the end result is it's quite hard to read/understand beyond a simple question and answer.
That's my personal issue with the Q&A type sites, there may be other issues as well -- I don't use/frequent them enough to know much beyond that.
-Jeff
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Jeff Sheltren jeff@tag1consulting.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
How would you define the difference in the Q&A style posts and a forum ? i.e what characteristics make a q&a interface not be a forum like setup ( and impact usability therefore )
In my opinion, the Q&A type posts are really hard to read as a discussion and ask/answer multiple questions (like a discussion would) or have any flow aside from "here's the answer". You end up with multiple "answers" (potentially voted up/down), and then each of those can have some seemingly random comments below them. You don't get the ability to "quote" posts, or have a back-and-forth type discussion such as you would be able to do with most (all?) forum software, and the end result is it's quite hard to read/understand beyond a simple question and answer.
Thanks, Jeff, for the note. I find the same. The Q&A style posts are far from what a forum is supposed to be. Let's forget about it for now when discussing a forum replacement.
Akemi
On 08/08/2012 06:03 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
Thanks, Jeff, for the note. I find the same. The Q&A style posts are far from what a forum is supposed to be. Let's forget about it for now when discussing a forum replacement.
ok. its going to be far easier and simpler ( if there is such a thing ) migrating to another forum stack that works in a similar manner to what we already have in place.
- KB
On 08/08/2012 11:55 AM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
How would you define the difference in the Q&A style posts and a forum ? i.e what characteristics make a q&a interface not be a forum like setup ( and impact usability therefore )
In my opinion, the Q&A type posts are really hard to read as a discussion and ask/answer multiple questions (like a discussion would) or have any flow aside from "here's the answer". You end up with multiple "answers" (potentially voted up/down), and then each of those can have some seemingly random comments below them. You don't get the ability to "quote" posts, or have a back-and-forth type discussion such as you would be able to do with most (all?) forum software, and the end result is it's quite hard to read/understand beyond a simple question and answer.
That's my personal issue with the Q&A type sites, there may be other issues as well -- I don't use/frequent them enough to know much beyond that.
I agree ... I hate the Q&A/serverfault type setups
Hi,
An update on where we are : So far it looks like there are really only 2 options. SMF and phpBB.
Trevor is looking into SMF ( and a couple of others as well )
I've setup a phpbb instance, setup some scripts for user and content migration and ported over a single forum from the xoops setup in place now. Details for this are now with the existing forum moderatots - lets see what they come back with.
By no means does this mean that a decision has been taken : if there are other better options out there, please do highlight them here.
- KB
On 08/10/2012 12:17 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Hi,
An update on where we are : So far it looks like there are really only 2 options. SMF and phpBB.
http://vanillaforums.org/ has been quite strongly recommended over twitter and also personally today by a couple of people. I'd never heard of it before, anyone have any experience with it?
On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 22:59 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
I'd never heard of it before, anyone have any experience with it?
Ideologically it's something along the lines of Phorum, but new, fancy, with more features packed in and by default looks a bit more like StackOverflow. It all boils down to an assessment of whether it fits your requirements better than the others or not...
On 08/10/2012 11:13 PM, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 22:59 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
I'd never heard of it before, anyone have any experience with it?
Ideologically it's something along the lines of Phorum, but new, fancy, with more features packed in and by default looks a bit more like StackOverflow. It all boils down to an assessment of whether it fits your requirements better than the others or not...
personally, I think lets thrash our phpbb and smf - and look at alternatives if we find a blocker that prevents us from using either.
On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
personally, I think lets thrash our phpbb and smf - and look at alternatives if we find a blocker that prevents us from using either.
Yes, +1
On 10/08/12 23:52, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Karanbir Singhmail-lists@karan.org wrote:
personally, I think lets thrash our phpbb and smf - and look at alternatives if we find a blocker that prevents us from using either.
Yes, +1
+1, sounds like a plan.
On 10/08/12 23:42, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 08/10/2012 11:13 PM, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 22:59 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
I'd never heard of it before, anyone have any experience with it?
Ideologically it's something along the lines of Phorum, but new, fancy, with more features packed in and by default looks a bit more like StackOverflow. It all boils down to an assessment of whether it fits your requirements better than the others or not...
personally, I think lets thrash our phpbb and smf - and look at alternatives if we find a blocker that prevents us from using either.
I've installed SMF in a CentOS 6 VM here and have started to set it up. It has about a million settings to tweak and some of those are not immediately obvious to a new forum admin :-) The good news is that it seems to coexist with selinux quite happily, the only setting I had to change was to allow httpd to network_connect_db but that's to be expected as the selinux boolean work_magically is still being worked on.
New board and forum set up seems to be fairly straight forward, permissions seem a bit incomprehensible but that's probably just a matter of getting used to what it all means. No doubt I shall make a few cock ups on the permission front before I get the hang of what it all means.
Overall, so far, I like the look of SMF in its out-of-the-box state more than I do the phpbb instance that KB has running. That one looks a bit Janet-and-John to me with big fonts and, thankfully, I'm not yet *quite* old enough to need large print books again.
Late now so I shall look again tomorrow and see what else I can see.
T
Hi Guys,
Keen on pushing the forum migration work forward, I've setup a trello board at : https://trello.com/board/forum-migration/504710938c6119d7369fc859
everyone who wants to pitch in, please email me your account names / logins and I'll add you to the board. I had a quick trawl through the forum thread at https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?viewmode=flat&topic_i... and picked up on the concerns that I could spot, feel free to add more in.
Can we then have a chat on IRC to workout the migration plan and go ahead run through it ? I'm going to go ahead and propose this friday the 7th at 14:00 UTC as an option. How does that work for everyone ?
Regards,
- KB
On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 2:03 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Can we then have a chat on IRC to workout the migration plan and go ahead run through it ? I'm going to go ahead and propose this friday the 7th at 14:00 UTC as an option. How does that work for everyone ?
It may be obvious but just in case... 14:00 UTC translates to "too early to get up for most people on the US west coast".
Akemi
On 09/05/2012 04:45 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
It may be obvious but just in case... 14:00 UTC translates to "too early to get up for most people on the US west coast".
what would be a suiteable time ?
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:05 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 09/05/2012 04:45 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
It may be obvious but just in case... 14:00 UTC translates to "too early to get up for most people on the US west coast".
what would be a suiteable time ?
I'm fine with 14:00 UTC, but an hour or two later would make it easier for others on the US west coast to attend -- though I'm not sure who all is interested.
-Jeff
On 09/06/2012 03:11 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I'm fine with 14:00 UTC, but an hour or two later would make it easier for others on the US west coast to attend -- though I'm not sure who all is interested.
Should we just decide on 16:00 and make it Monday the 10th ? That way the only people who struggle will be people from the far East, and we dont have many of them in the present forums ( am trying to change that as well, but its going to take some time! )
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Should we just decide on 16:00 and make it Monday the 10th ? That way the only people who struggle will be people from the far East, and we dont have many of them in the present forums ( am trying to change that as well, but its going to take some time! )
Works for me. If anyone is interested in attending and can't make 16:00 UTC on Monday, September 10, please speak up.
-Jeff
On 06/09/12 15:51, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 7:46 AM, Karanbir Singhmail-lists@karan.org wrote:
Should we just decide on 16:00 and make it Monday the 10th ? That way the only people who struggle will be people from the far East, and we dont have many of them in the present forums ( am trying to change that as well, but its going to take some time! )
Works for me. If anyone is interested in attending and can't make 16:00 UTC on Monday, September 10, please speak up.
-Jeff
I'm unable to make Monday at all (work commitments) but I'm sure Akemi is able to do a good job representing the current forum moderation team.
So apologies for my absence.
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Ned Slider ned@unixmail.co.uk wrote:
On 06/09/12 15:51, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
Works for me. If anyone is interested in attending and can't make 16:00 UTC on Monday, September 10, please speak up.
-Jeff
I'm unable to make Monday at all (work commitments) but I'm sure Akemi is able to do a good job representing the current forum moderation team.
That makes it sound as if I have no work commitments. :) Usually I have little problem finding an hour or so during $dayjob hours but Monday mornings are set aside for a lab meeting. So, no guarantee that I'll be there.
Akemi
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 9:04 AM, Akemi Yagi amyagi@gmail.com wrote:
Works for me. If anyone is interested in attending and can't make 16:00 UTC on Monday, September 10, please speak up.
-Jeff
I'm unable to make Monday at all (work commitments) but I'm sure Akemi is able to do a good job representing the current forum moderation team.
That makes it sound as if I have no work commitments. :) Usually I have little problem finding an hour or so during $dayjob hours but Monday mornings are set aside for a lab meeting. So, no guarantee that I'll be there.
We met just now and got through some of the backlog cards on the Trello board which is being used for planning. We've assigned out a number of tasks and will meet again at the same time (16:00 UTC) on Friday, Sept. 14th to review status and try to get through the rest of the backlog. Please feel free to join if you are interested, even if you weren't at the first meeting. Meeting is in #centos-devel on Freenode.
Present at this meeting were (irc nicks): avij, Jeff_S, toracat, TrevorH1, z00dax
-Jeff
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Jeff Sheltren jeff@tag1consulting.com wrote:
We've assigned out a number of tasks and will meet again at the same time (16:00 UTC) on Friday, Sept. 14th to review status and try to get through the rest of the backlog. Please feel free to join if you are interested, even if you weren't at the first meeting. Meeting is in #centos-devel on Freenode.
This meeting was postponed because we had a conflict and couldn't all attend. We've made some progress throughout the week on some pending tasks (board config options, backup for DB and web files, etc.), but still have quite a bit to do.
I'd like to propose we meet at the same time this coming Monday, Sept. 17th at 16:00 UTC to catch up on the backlog and discuss next plans and schedule for wrapping up some of these tasks.
If anyone interested/involved has a problem with that time, please reply and suggest alternatives...
Thanks, Jeff
On 09/14/2012 05:43 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I'd like to propose we meet at the same time this coming Monday, Sept. 17th at 16:00 UTC to catch up on the backlog and discuss next plans and schedule for wrapping up some of these tasks.
Can we do 20:00 UTC ( ~ 21:00 BST ) instead ? That would work a lot better for me.
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 09/14/2012 05:43 PM, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
I'd like to propose we meet at the same time this coming Monday, Sept. 17th at 16:00 UTC to catch up on the backlog and discuss next plans and schedule for wrapping up some of these tasks.
Can we do 20:00 UTC ( ~ 21:00 BST ) instead ? That would work a lot better for me.
20:00 UTC (13:00 PDT) works for me as well.
Akemi
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 1:29 AM, Akemi Yagi amyagi@gmail.com wrote:
Can we do 20:00 UTC ( ~ 21:00 BST ) instead ? That would work a lot better for me.
20:00 UTC (13:00 PDT) works for me as well.
No problem here. Let's do 20:00 UTC on Monday.
-Jeff
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Jeff Sheltren jeff@tag1consulting.com wrote:
No problem here. Let's do 20:00 UTC on Monday.
And the next? I may not be available Friday p.m. (PDT) and Monday a.m. (PDT).
Akemi
On 09/20/2012 04:29 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Jeff Sheltren jeff@tag1consulting.com wrote:
No problem here. Let's do 20:00 UTC on Monday.
And the next? I may not be available Friday p.m. (PDT) and Monday a.m. (PDT).
Tuesday 25th @ 20:00 UTC ?
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 8:32 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 09/20/2012 04:29 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Jeff Sheltren jeff@tag1consulting.com wrote:
No problem here. Let's do 20:00 UTC on Monday.
And the next? I may not be available Friday p.m. (PDT) and Monday a.m. (PDT).
Tuesday 25th @ 20:00 UTC ?
OK here.
Akemi
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Akemi Yagi amyagi@gmail.com wrote:
Tuesday 25th @ 20:00 UTC ?
OK here.
That works for me.
-Jeff
On 10/23/2012 05:57 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
So, what's the plan now?
we need someone to come up with the banner ( is my impression ) - lets do that, then time it for a few days, and do the migration. I think all blockers are now behind us.
On 10/24/2012 01:01 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 10/23/2012 05:57 PM, Akemi Yagi wrote:
So, what's the plan now?
we need someone to come up with the banner ( is my impression ) - lets do that, then time it for a few days, and do the migration. I think all blockers are now behind us.
Migrating on the 19th.
On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:10 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 10/24/2012 01:01 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
we need someone to come up with the banner ( is my impression ) - lets do that, then time it for a few days, and do the migration. I think all blockers are now behind us.
Migrating on the 19th.
Is this on schedule? If so, the banner should be placed now. Who is able to do this?
Akemi
On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:10 AM, Karanbir Singh mail-lists@karan.org wrote:
On 10/24/2012 01:01 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
we need someone to come up with the banner ( is my impression ) - lets do that, then time it for a few days, and do the migration. I think all blockers are now behind us.
Migrating on the 19th.
Any update on this would be greatly appreciated.
Akemi
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Akemi Yagi -
Ant -
Jeff Sheltren -
John R. Dennison -
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Nux! -
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