[CentOS-devel] Forum overhaul

Tue May 25 22:18:31 UTC 2010
Monte Milanuk <memilanuk at gmail.com>

On 5/25/10 2:12 PM, R P Herrold wrote:
>
> I would add [with the benefit of time and knowing what is
> happening in the broader Open Source world] to z00dax'
> comment, that it should support federated authentication
> [ldap,OpenID, whatever]; show a low attack surface history at
> the CVE; be in active maintenance or better, development; be
> in a language permitting addon extensibility without having to
> 'marry' the darn thing; and permit 'static' top pages to
> address 'slashdotting'.  Does it integrate well with puppet,
> mailman, and stock CentOS tools; is it Free and Open Source
> software using CentOS stock supporting packages?

Valid points.  Any suggested products that meet said criterion?

> But all I see from the talkers, is talk; nothing
> prevents any of the talkers from doing in a sandbox somewhere,
> so far as I know.

 From what I gathered, there *is* some work going on in a sandbox 
somewhere, it's just never making it to the production server for what 
ever reason - whether its not working, or just not finished.

> And meeting the artistic sensibilities of some people is in
> the core goal set of CentOS, such that the project leaders
> _want_ to care just, because ...?

'Artistic sensibilities'... thats a good one.  Have you tried looking at 
the site recently?  Specifically the nearly illegible menus in the forum 
proper?  Its not so much a matter of 'looking pretty' as 'being less 
painful to use'.


> I see:
>
>> X-User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X
>> 10.6; en-US;  rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Lightning/1.0b1
>> Thunderbird/3.0.4
>
> and frankly this is a GUI users complaint, I guess,
> considering the source

Frankly I don't see what OS I run on my day-to-day laptop has jack-all 
to do with anything related to whether or not the forum software is 
borderline broken.


> Perhaps a running and ovbiously better replacement would
> convince the core team that it cares to undertake the pain of
> a conversion, and ongoing maintenance

Ya know, I don't really care if there is a forum or not - but since 
there is, I think it should work as expected.  Traditionally new users 
asking the same questions over and over again are advised to 'use the 
Search function' - which in the case of the CentOS forums returns 
exactly one page of results - thats it - over and over again.  Doesn't 
matter what the search parameters are, it doesn't work properly, period.

Mailing lists are fine with me, and judging from some of the posts in 
the various threads (and yours), maybe CentOS would be better off just 
not having a forum at all.