Brontoforumus Archive
Discussion Boards => High-Context Discourse => Topic started by: Brentai on January 13, 2014, 08:53:57 AM
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So it's becoming increasingly less of a secret that a migration of some sort is imminent. I'm going to be using this opportunity to sever some limbs and fix a lot of the stuff that has been left broken around here for a little too long. One of those broken things is SMF 2.0.6, and more specifically, karma.
From SMF 2.0 on, stuff we used to love/hate around here, like karma reasons, has been unsupported and curiously just keeps on remaining unsupported. It's getting to the point where the only way to build the Brontoforums we deserve need want is to drop SMF and try to find something that's got the kind of candy we're looking for. This of course will necessarily require a fresh start.
Now, that doesn't mean we have to delete stuff. We've already demonstrated that you can comfortably run an entirely separate instance of the forum (Wrath) on the same server and not be any worse off for it. I can pretty easily restore this thing, and stuff it in a subdomain like prehistoric.brontoforum.us (or go buy apatoforum.us just to be punchy) so that people can still go back and read The End and stuff. Either way I sort of have to rebuild SMF and figure out a way to stick all the past several years of posts back in*, because we're going to be salting the Earth pretty hard when this move takes place.
People get attached to things, though, so I'm putting it up for debate now while there's still a pretty good lead time on whatever is about to happen. Take your vote and comment if you've got any suggestions about what we can do to make this place more tyrannical!!!
I mean, gnilley.
This place is already pretty tyrannical.
* Which I already did once when we moved from gamespite to brontoforum, so it must not be that hard. I just kinda forget absolutely everything about how to do it.
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I personally am curious to see what other forum software is out there. Simple Machines is old and seems a bit limited. The only one I think is neat offhand is Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/), which is radically different from how we're used to posting. Which I'm not opposed to. I've never been a big fan of the multiple child boards and crazy gigantic threads we've grown so fond of, and Discourse seems to encourage smaller, more frequent posts that can be categorized under similar tags. I like that. It's also not quite at version 1 yet.
Either way, enough of us are devs with free time that we could probably through up a repository to customize the hell out of whatever we get anyway.
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I don't mind at all if we move, but if the options are "Blow everything up and create a lot of work for Brentai and maybe other people" and "Karma stays broken" I really don't give a damn if Karma stays broken.
Like, it's a cute little nice-to-have thing, but not really important.
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Like, it's a cute little nice-to-have thing, but not really important.
Karma++;
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My number one desire of new forum software would be a way to read the forum on a phone that also supports inline images. Talking Time has Tapatalk support and Something Awful has its own Awful app, but all Brontoforum.us has is the WAP2 link at the bottom so I usually don't come here on my phone.
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The main reason I'm doing this now is because most of everything is going to blow up anyway. This does involve some extra work (building a new forum from scratch) but not much more than I'll be doing, and it's actually one of the more interesting administration tasks.
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I voted keep the forum mostly because I'm okay with the least amount of work possible.
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The main reason I'm doing this now is because most of everything is going to blow up anyway. This does involve some extra work (building a new forum from scratch) but not much more than I'll be doing, and it's actually one of the more interesting administration tasks.
O-
Well.
In that case, go crazy go nuts?
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Can we bring back Dolphin Dash?
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Discourse looks neat, my main concerns are that it might discourage longer posts like Friday's stories, and encourage the sort of huffs people get into around here when posts start coming in too fast. Also not too sure how well admins can manage uploaded pics and files in the current version. We have to be careful about that sort of thing since we've had problems with image hacks in the past.
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I'd rather we try some new software than keep the old (though it would be cool to keep it around for archival purposes). I'll reskin the new forum however we need it.
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As an aside, no matter what we do I'd like a skin option that sets a max-width on the text columns and increases the font size a little. At home I use a 27" monitor and reading stuff on these forums is a pain.
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I'm not sure browser you're using, but with firefox I can change the text size by holding ctrl and using the scroll wheel.
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It's the same in Chrome, but that has an awful habit of making EVERYTHING zoom in, which makes images fugly.
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I have been interested to try a Discourse forum for a while, so if you're gonna nuke everything anyhow, that'd be cool.
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Discourse looks ugly as sin.
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BrontoChan
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I saw 'infinite scrolling' as the first point on the Discourse sell sheet and noped out of there. Let's not make things harder to navigate, okay?
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I saw 'infinite scrolling' as the first point on the Discourse sell sheet and noped out of there. Let's not make things harder to navigate, okay?
Er, how so?
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Well, what commitment level are we talking about here? If we migrate to new forum architecture, are we then stuck with that, or a different but still new alternate? Will switching back be easy or even feasible under a new server setup?
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Also, I guess we'll lose Arc's sole remaining bequest; our historic collection of thread icons.
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I say we make 2014 the year of constantly trying to build a new home. A forum of nomadic architects.
You know, just to test whether or not we really like each other to stick together through several iterations of forum changes or that we're just too lazy to actually leave and find new friends.
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I saw 'infinite scrolling' as the first point on the Discourse sell sheet and noped out of there. Let's not make things harder to navigate, okay?
Er, how so?
Well, they claim you can keep your place, but apparently that doesn't apply to casual browsing because I went into their huge test thread, scrolled down, backed out, then clicked again. Back to the beginning with most of the posts unloaded. I should hope the problems with browsing the forum should become obvious, then? (tip: I can jump anywhere I want with minimal loading in a paged thread. Can't do that with infinite scroll.)
Plus, what's full loading time like for big threads? Even if we go to a smaller thread model, we'll still have megathreads like the OH schedule thread. Imagine having to load two or three years of schedules just to find out what's playing this Saturday.
Basically I just hate infinite scroll and consider it the worst thing that ever happened to the internet and would like to avoid it as much as possible.
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Infinite scroll would basically break my posting or even viewing from my phone.
Of course, that may be considered a plus by some members of the forum. :whoops:
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At home I use a 27" monitor and reading stuff on these forums is a pain.
(http://www.intentionallyblank.net/images/forumresources/moneytears.gif)
Aside from being Constant-mean, as long as I can keep doing LPs I have no strong feelings one way or the other. So no silly, like, five-image limit in posts or anything.
Otherwise I'll have to go do LPs on Talking Time, and nobody wants that.
Least of all Talking Time.
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Infinite scroll might be capable of being disabled. Once I had an account there, I had no problem jumping in or out of threads. Plus, there's a button that'll take you to the most recent post in any thread. There's a lot I love about Discourse, and fully through my support behind it, even willing to skin or script it to see if I can do anything for our needs
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YA KNOW, the last time I was part of a forum that went through a software change, we switched to ning.
Who wants to ning it up? Huh? Huh? Show of hands. Come on.
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Old-and-busted has its own special kind of charm, but I'm legitimately curious about any eventual New Hotness. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff out there that would make us look back and think "how did we ever manage without this". Not that I have any suggestions though, I know basically nothing about forum software.
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I would love the option for infinite scroll, or some other means of just loading an entire thread into one page. For ease of searching big threads, and for the general hassle-avoidance of continually clicking through pages.
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For those advocating certain new forum software, would it be possible for you guys to link to any working examples?
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Karma is like, a huge drama magnet.
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Discourse looks like an ugly piece of shit, let's not do that.
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So no silly, like, five-image limit in posts or anything.
Infinite scrolling
Opposite problem, still terrible. Is it even remotely possible to turn off infinite scroll on a perthread basis? Who wants to load 200 images at a time until there are 4000 images on one page?
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Basically I just hate infinite scroll and consider it the worst thing that ever happened to the internet and would like to avoid it as much as possible.
(http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu23/Bon_Bon_2009/scruffy-1.jpg)
Karma is like, a huge drama magnet.
(http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu23/Bon_Bon_2009/scruffy-1.jpg)
I'd like to keep the old threads archived somewhere but I'm perfectly okay with starting over. Can't add much in the way of recommendations because I haven't really kept tabs on new software.
My usual complaints still apply: I think Guild Hall was and is a bad idea, and we've got too many subforums and megathreads. BUT each serves its purpose in some way too. It's nice to have a good, easy way of organizing things.
And I favor something with a robust means of keeping spammers and, say, eloH out.
Something with better phone support might be a good idea. And the search function here's pretty hit-or-miss. And if we do end up with something similar to our current boards/threads categorization, it'd be nice if splitmerging were a quicker process (which I suppose is also implicit in "better phone support").
I DO like our library of emoticons and the ease of spoilertagging and posting YouTube videos.
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So no silly, like, five-image limit in posts or anything.
Infinite scrolling
Opposite problem, still terrible. Is it even remotely possible to turn off infinite scroll on a perthread basis? Who wants to load 200 images at a time until there are 4000 images on one page?
Me when I'm reading your LPs.
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I say we make 2014 the year of constantly trying to build a new home. A forum of nomadic architects.
You know, just to test whether or not we really like each other to stick together through several iterations of forum changes or that we're just too lazy to actually leave and find new friends.
Cool, I'll kick us off with an iteration that's intentionally wrong! The last thing we need is a brontoforumus subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/brontoforumus/), but now it exists regardless.
As much fun as it is to make sense of many-tiered quote-boxes charting the winding tendrils of conversations past to provide context to an individual response in one of our megathreads, I do think we'd benefit from some sort of threaded conversation system. What would be better is the option to switch between a threaded view and a sequential view, since the latter makes a lot more sense for LP threads and Werewolf (or other forum games).
Speaking of options, I'd be fine with the option to enable or disable infinite scroll, but if we had to commit to one or the other, I'd prefer no infinite.
I like karma; I'd like the ability to sort threads or posts by rating even better.
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I liked it when the forums would tell me that someone had enjoyed one of my posts (and which one, and who) and I liked being able to tell the forums to do the same for somebody else. How you fuckers manage to keep turning that into drama is beyond me.
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From channel conversations I've developed the opinion that, for all its skin-crawling associations with Facebook and its ilk, a Like/Upvote button for individual posts is really the best way to go with karma. We should have something that serves as a non-obtrusive alternative to "This", "Hahaha" and "Golgo 13 with a mustache" posts (but not a compulsory one - you can still explicitly second someone if you want), but I think associating opinions to specific posts rather than the poster him/herself is more appropriate, and negative feedback buttons really serve no purpose other than to generate arguments. We've never had a problem with positive karma. How the fuck do you even have a problem with positive karma?
As far as load-on-scroll goes, it should probably be optional at the very best. It tends to cause a lot of problems if poorly implemented and some people just can't stand it, as opposed to paging which most people can at least tolerate. A real paginator with an items-per-page option is obviously a good and modern idea and SMF's continued lack of any such thing is one of the many reasons why we're having this conversation.
Bongo brings up the most relevant argument against Discourse (and so did Soup, in the beginning): It's not quite baked yet. There's probably going to be a lot of things changing, a lot of things breaking, and probably a lot of security holes opening and closing all over. I wouldn't normally sweat that for a community this small but we seem to make a habit of pissing off script kiddiez, so I'd rather not give them something so easy to play with.
Image limits are clearly out, check. Screenshot LPs are simultaneously the best argument for and against load-on-scroll, but since the main maintainer of such is against it we should probably lean thataways. We should keep an eye out for something that makes such things easier to consume (especially on widescreen 27 inch monitors, like mine), but will also show up on a mobile device and not completely violate somebody's data plan.
The more skinnable, the better. I want to give Kabbage the best canvas possible.
Gathering up other things mentioned in the thread:
- Conversation threading (might not want to hold your breath for this one)
- Subforums OR general organization. Most of you guys seem to think that Discourse's lack of subforums is chaos and it really isn't, it has a tag cloud* and I really do think tag clouds could be pretty damned useful. Instead of creating and managing a bunch of weird static subforums we just create tags on whatever fly we want and group relevant threads together, one-to-many. Easy peasy, and no moving threads to this or that more appropriate forum is ever required.
- Emoticons. I doubt any decent package will not support our emoticons.
- Highlight spoilertagging. Agreed on this, dropdown spoilertags are the worst.
- Inline YouTube. Probably not too hard to support. tbf I kind of wish YouTube was a tag like img so that you could paste a YouTube URL and not have it turn into a video on you.
- Thread icons that don't rely on the one sysadmin FTPing gifs into an obscure directory on the backend of the system, then tricking the admin panel into recognizing it as the source icon of the thread's first post.
- Mobile browsing with images has already been covered but I guess I'll make it another bullet point just to drive the point in. Remember that I probably spend more time browsing here on WAP2 than on a PC and I appreciate the simplicity, but it would actually be nice to not have to switch over to full mode to see what the hell people are replying to. (I realize that this sounds like I'm implying that WAP2 itself is responsible for our WAP2 version not having images. It's not.)
Dolphin Dash No.- Also covered above, but there needs to be a way to set a max-width on the forum because people have widescreen monitors now. Or not, really - I wouldn't mind having this as an optional skin. SMF supports this just fine, we just never bothered to do anything about it.
* Or at least it claims to, I only see a single category tag on their sandbox.
Addressing other concerns:
Well, what commitment level are we talking about here? If we migrate to new forum architecture, are we then stuck with that, or a different but still new alternate? Will switching back be easy or even feasible under a new server setup?
The only thing tying us to new architecture would be whatever posts we create in that system - if we end up becoming averse to losing those, we'd be stuck on that system for a while. This right now is nice timing because there isn't anything like a Wolf game or an LP going on that a migration would interrupt.
We can (probably) come back to this board at any time, assuming I can safely migrate it over, which I fully intend to put every effort into doing. It will be around either way, most likely just hanging around as its own subdomain (currently leaning heavily towards fossilized.brontoforum.us).
Also, I guess we'll lose Arc's sole remaining bequest; our historic collection of thread icons.
Again, plan is to archive entire forum in a subdomain - icons will go along with that.
Who wants to ning it up? Huh? Huh? Show of hands. Come on.
Keeping in mind that I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of social networking software, I cannot tell if you are actually being sarcastic here or not.
For those advocating certain new forum software, would it be possible for you guys to link to any working examples?
Discourse Sandbox: http://try.discourse.org/categories (http://try.discourse.org/categories)
I think Discourse itself is pretty much out of the race at this point, but it does serve as a pretty good marker for where we can start looking for features. I doubt we'll ever get 100% of what we want without building the damned thing ourselves (and we'll never get 100% of what we all want as a group for obvious logical reasons), but we can sift through and pick our favorite nicked-up diamond in the rough.
I need sleep.
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The Arc thing I was mostly kidding about. Though getting the ability to make new thread icons would be cool!
Also, I think it's pretty funny that I can't read discourse on my work browser (IE8 on a creaky XP box) AT ALL (remember kids, I work for a tech company!). :glee:
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This right now is nice timing because there isn't anything like a Wolf game or an LP going on that a migration would interrupt.
Glad you mentioned that's a factor. I'll hold off starting a new one until this is all done with, then.
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I say we make 2014 the year of constantly trying to build a new home. A forum of nomadic architects.
You know, just to test whether or not we really like each other to stick together through several iterations of forum changes or that we're just too lazy to actually leave and find new friends.
Cool, I'll kick us off with an iteration that's intentionally wrong! The last thing we need is a brontoforumus subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/brontoforumus/), but now it exists regardless.
As much fun as it is to make sense of many-tiered quote-boxes charting the winding tendrils of conversations past to provide context to an individual response in one of our megathreads, I do think we'd benefit from some sort of threaded conversation system. What would be better is the option to switch between a threaded view and a sequential view, since the latter makes a lot more sense for LP threads and Werewolf (or other forum games).
Speaking of options, I'd be fine with the option to enable or disable infinite scroll, but if we had to commit to one or the other, I'd prefer no infinite.
I like karma; I'd like the ability to sort threads or posts by rating even better.
What is reddit?
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Sorry. I tend to forget not everybody has been bounced around shitty forums like I was.
ning is a social networking forum hybrid. Everyone gets a MySpace type page and as for forums, there's a community area and you can kind of make a new forum or subforum as you please and anyone can lock it to only certain people or whatever.
It's bizarre and convoluted and encourages small groups of friends over group discussions.
It's got its perks but I remember it having a giant ass learning curve just to use it.
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I say we make 2014 the year of constantly trying to build a new home. A forum of nomadic architects.
You know, just to test whether or not we really like each other to stick together through several iterations of forum changes or that we're just too lazy to actually leave and find new friends.
Cool, I'll kick us off with an iteration that's intentionally wrong! The last thing we need is a brontoforumus subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/brontoforumus/), but now it exists regardless.
As much fun as it is to make sense of many-tiered quote-boxes charting the winding tendrils of conversations past to provide context to an individual response in one of our megathreads, I do think we'd benefit from some sort of threaded conversation system. What would be better is the option to switch between a threaded view and a sequential view, since the latter makes a lot more sense for LP threads and Werewolf (or other forum games).
Speaking of options, I'd be fine with the option to enable or disable infinite scroll, but if we had to commit to one or the other, I'd prefer no infinite.
I like karma; I'd like the ability to sort threads or posts by rating even better.
What is reddit?
no greater hive of scum and villainy
Well, okay, 4chan is probably worse. But 4chan is also much funnier and more productive.
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Looked at some of the BB options that Wikipedia had listed and... man, the field for BB systems is depressing. Whatever we end up going with may involve us bolting on our own additions if we wanted. Things like Tumblr and Facebook killed most of the big forum innovations. I think there's room to grow and new ways to have a discussion community other than just a timeline ordered list of posts. But damned if it exists.
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Karma is like, a huge drama magnet.
Drama is one of my favorite things.
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What is reddit?
If this is sincere, I envy you.
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I looked it up, doesn't seem like a thing Mali's would enjoy.
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I'd recommend people poke around on Discourse before dismissing it out of hand. After using it for a while, the Infinite Scroll seems to have been more well thought out that previous ones. It does remember exactly where you were last time, as well as update your URL for direct linking to a post. It also allows for replying to a post as a new topic, which is interesting.
I think the thing that keeps me interested in Discourse is just how much all the other free forums are pretty much just versions of Simple Machines, give or take features. I also am gonna have to disregard any aesthetic complaints considering most forum software is pretty damned ugly and this one only looks the way it does because of the tireless efforts of the 'Bage.
There's still stuff that's missing, of course. At the end of the day, the state of open source forum software seems to be pretty dismal. So it doesn't look like there's going to be some great magic bullet. I'm at least in favor of getting rid of the pretty old Simple Machines that does not seem to be doing what we want anymore.
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Also I mentioned it in chat, but a few of you weirdos don't frequent the better part of the community so I'll say it again here:
Replace the Karma buttons on our new forum with "Cause Drama" buttons.
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If we buy forums software...
1) What are the costs? How much?
2) Would that be a one-time license or ongoing?
3) Are there significant feature or support advantages over freeware?
Because I don't mind fronting some bucks if shelling out will make a significant qualitative difference.
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Replace the Karma buttons on our new forum with "Cause Drama" buttons.
Drama++;
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Also I mentioned it in chat, but a few of you weirdos don't frequent the better part of the community so I'll say it again here:
Replace the Karma buttons on our new forum with "Cause Drama" buttons.
Welp, if we just have positive karma, that solves your problem, right?
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IIRC, there was an incident which made it so that we cannot have nice things.
That Karma also eventually broke may also have been a factor.
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Doing some research, it looks like "Ridiculously Overpriced" is the answer. The cheapest one is $130 for a year before you stop receiving upgrades and support, another one is $175 to install proprietary software which looks like it also wants to charge per month based on the number of users.
Looking at the Comparison of Internet Forum Software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software) page on Wikipedia will give you an idea of the options out there.
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From wiki:
Discourse User-selectable themes No
So yeah, let's not do discourse ever, ok.
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Because we've been living it up in user selectable theme paradise here.
Is there anybody not using the Bronto theme here? Raise your hand*
*And be banned for life
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We at least had two colors at one point, what the fuck happened. I guess SMF really is kind of awful.
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You can change the theme in your profile, but it's all a bunch of baked-in SMF themes. But, honestly, "user-selected" theme has never been something we on the forums have cared too much about. Note that you didn't even seem to notice that the multiple color selection options vanished.
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Having multiple themes seems like it would be more immediately relevant to Discourse than it was to SMF. Unless you can deal with the fact that even if we did adopt your favorite system, the first thing we'd probably do is tear out features from its default UI until it resembled a poor clone of SMF.
Also, I think people haven't missed theme options because they're all resigned to accepting deficiencies in the UI around here. That broken navbar up there has been hanging around for YEARS now. I fully encourage people to be a lot more demanding with this next iteration (just be prepared to deal with my usual crankiness about it).
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Is there anybody not using the Bronto theme here? Raise your hand*
I used to work jobs where I had a lot of downtime (mostly waiting for laptops to image). It's bad enough to be reading this thing at work WITHOUT it being bright pink.
*And be banned for life
:leaving:
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First against the wall
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Brent, are you experimenting with shit right now? I can post fine elsewhere, but I just tried to post in the "Don't You Know There's a War On?" thread and it just breaks the forum when I try.
What an oddly specific error.
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[Joke about the NSA]
[This post shortly vanishes]
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Update: Constantine tried to post in that thread, and claims he did, but the thread shows no new posts. :hurr:
Maybe this is happening with some other threads, but that's the only one I've noticed it with so far.
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I'm doing nothing. I don't know what you're doing.
Constantine's post ended up in the trash somehow.
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Because I deleted it. I told him this.
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All right, so I'm currently leaning very heavily towards Vanilla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_%28forum%29). It's a GPL project, fully funded by hosting and support services. The idea behind it is that the core software itself is very, very feature-light, and almost everything - quotes, who's online, you-name-it - is tacked on by plugins, many of which have been professionally code-reviewed and blessed. It's our best bet for getting something like a bespoke forum setup without writing the damn thing ourselves.
And, while I don't necessarily want to bring this up but I know somebody else will: It's the same software that the Penny Arcade forums use. Gotta figure, hell, if it's got the social options available to keep that group from trying to literally assfuck each other all the time, there must be some magic it. And to be honest, I like the idea that PA Inc. has probably been making its own contributions to the project for a while now.
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Vanilla looks pretty good. Any way we could start a repo on bitbucket to host plugins?
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What sort of time table are we looking at here, by the way. In the next few months? Or by the end of the week?
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From wiki:
Discourse User-selectable themes No
So yeah, let's not do discourse ever, ok.
Stylish (Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en), Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/)) lets you impose your personal design on the web.
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I like the idea of a forum that acts like a Structure Deck in a TCG. It's okay straight out of the box, but then you add in what you want and what you enjoy and it becomes your own.
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I'm hesitant to give dates, but I could order the new machine any time I decide to at this point. It's all in place.
GameServers (it's still GameServers, they've been overall very excellent providers) says they can keep the current machine in place for about a week after the new one's up so we can make a smooth transition of it, but I don't know what kind of lead time the new machine will have to set up, and I'm not going to pull the trigger until I feel confident that everything that's currently here is safely backed up somewhere.
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All right, so I'm currently leaning very heavily towards Vanilla (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_%28forum%29).
Yeah, looks the best out of everything I've seen in my extensive research clicking on links in that Wikipedia article Constantine mentioned.
Er, I mean, Golgo 13 with a mustache.
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A good barebones framework that we can do what we want to seems like a good idea to me too.
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There's also a tool called Vanilla Porter (http://vanillaforums.org/addon/porter-core) (mmmm, vanilla porter) which can do an export/import from an existing forum into Vanilla. It says it supports SMF. In which case there might be a third option besides the two in the poll up top.
Obviously there are a lot of moving parts and plenty of potential for breakage in an export/import operation, but it might be worth at least trying it and seeing if it works satisfactorily. And then if it doesn't we can always fall back to the "keep the old boards on a subdomain and start fresh" option.
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I'm fine with whatever Brent wants. I love him long time.
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please send help
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Yeah, looks the best out of everything I've seen in my extensive research clicking on links in that Wikipedia article Constantine mentioned.
Er, I mean, Golgo 13 with a mustache.
I'm not entirely sure if you're sassing me specifically or just being sassy in general, but it seems like you agree, so I'll just go with that. Feeling pretty good about this decision you guys.
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LETS GET THIS TRAIN A-MOVIN'!
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I'm only familiar with Vanilla through the Penny Arcade forums, and while that looks pretty good, keep in mind they probably have an army of volunteers there working on the code, so of course it'll look good. At the very least I'd like to see some middle-tier Vanilla boards as well, to see what can be done when you have fewer resources on tap.
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Well, PA is a bit misrepresentative because it's a hosted solution as well, which means it works and is supported differently than the off-the-shelf, roll your own variety. Wikipedia gives two examples of non-hosted sites, one of which is down, and the other is http://www.babyforum.at/ (http://www.babyforum.at/), which is in German, but right off the bat you can tell that its presentation and layout is quite fundamentally different than PA or the SMF norm despite using the same base engine. Speaks a lot about the potential customizability of the thing.
Also, it is a forum about raising children that has a trenchcoat-flasher smiley.
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Also I want to suggest that the Positive/Negative karma buttons be labeled Mongrel/Drama
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FOR THE LAST TIME THERE WILL BE NO DRAMA BUTTON
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sounds like someone pushed your drama button...
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:suave:
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the drama button was within us all along
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I can live with being associated with good karma.
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But why would we label the karma button Mongrel if it DOESN'T include the pointless commentary?
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But why would we label the karma button Mongrel if it DOESN'T include the pointless commentary?
Drama++;
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While we're making pretty requests, can we make it so that there's a scheme that makes Caithness's avatar/signature theming look contiguous before he dumps them in the avatarchive?
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How would that even work
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I don't know, but I want your creepy smiling kid to be creepy as intended instead of because he's doing some fucked up kilroy was here thing at the bottom of your posts.
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But why would we label the karma button Mongrel if it DOESN'T include the pointless commentary?
It's okay Niku, my posts will always contain a surfeit of pointless commentary.
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oh man i fucking love souffles
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I'm only familiar with Vanilla through the Penny Arcade forums, and while that looks pretty good, keep in mind they probably have an army of volunteers there working on the code, so of course it'll look good. At the very least I'd like to see some middle-tier Vanilla boards as well, to see what can be done when you have fewer resources on tap.
One thing about the Penny Arcade forums is that it is impossible to change your name. The guy who runs them claims this is because of technical reasons in the software, that he has to manually edit the entire database to change a name. This is probably total bullshit because he's a worthless jackass, but is worth verifying.
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The only reason that would be impossible (not really impossible) is if the displayed name was the same as your username. Which nobody does anymore. Sounds like he's just making excuses, and providing a sort of technically sounding excuse hoping nobody will be smart enough to call him on it.
I mean, I say that without actually *reading* what his excuse is. But if you're on target about it, then yeah, he's probably spewing bullshit.
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Yeah, as described, the situation is one of three things:
1) this forum software is extremely terrible and written by blithering idiots
2) his implementation of this forum software is extremely terrible because he is a blithering idiot
3) he is a bald-faced liar
and I want to preclude #1.
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But why would we label the karma button Mongrel if it DOESN'T include the pointless commentary?
It's okay Niku, my posts will always contain a surfeit of pointless commentary. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
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I am absolutely certain that a display name plugin for Vanilla would be trivial to write if it hasn't been already written already. That admin just doesn't want to say that it's a (reasonable) policy. My natural instinct is to be mean about it but then I remember that he's dealing with thousands of feces-filled explosives shaped like humans that are just looking for a reason to explode all over someone.
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You know how around here, people sometimes complain about how they couldn't tell Poster X was Person Y, because we keep changing our names? Imagine a community of ten thousand people with the ability to do that.
"I can't do it" is a better way to get them to shut up than "It would create a nightmare."
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Nah, I'm of the opinion that just coming out and saying "It's our policy not to allow that" is a better tactic than trying to come up with a dumb technical reason.
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Idiots will dispute policy until they're blue in the face (and you end up spending all your time going "no, free speech doesn't apply on private forums"), but technical limitations, even manufactured ones, are difficult for the uninformed to contest.
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It's also possible that we're misinterpreting the situation and he really was talking about login names, which are a while different animal. Login IDs are tired to the authentication scheme and changing one is neither trivial not advisable.
My point here is that Vanilla is specifically designed so that if we run into a limitation like this we should be able to either find or build a solution for it, so I wouldn't get too worried about missing features.
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One thing about the Penny Arcade forums is that it is impossible to change your name. The guy who runs them claims this is because of technical reasons in the software, that he has to manually edit the entire database to change a name. This is probably total bullshit because he's a worthless jackass, but is worth verifying.
Turns out this is entirely wrong.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/vanilla/discussion/73711 (http://forums.penny-arcade.com/vanilla/discussion/73711)
Short version: "If we allow wanton namechanges, that will be the only thing I will ever be able to do. We can namechange, just look for the thread that I make and I'll flip a coin on it."
So, yes. Size of the community issue.
Vanilla seems entirely capable of letting users handle it as well, so for our small close-knit circle of antagonists, it should be great!
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Yes, that's what I said. Tube insists that the only way to change a name is for him to do it himself manually, and thus no name changes. It wouldn't be "the only thing I will ever be able to do" if he weren't pretending that it was something he had to do by hand.
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Ehh, I'm unsure of the exact reasoning he's putting that thread. He doesn't explain why people would have to be PMing him for name changes. That doesn't make sense, and if he thinks that's the only way to allow name changes that's stupid. If the field is on the user's profile, they can edit it there and the admin's don't have to do shit. You know, like how our forums work. Either he's incompetent or disingenuous.
Either way, the short answer is that yes, you'll be able to edit your name. Hell, we could probably add logging so you could check what name any user has previously used. And probably even show a more hardwired username somewhere for ease.
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He isn't pretending. It's a clash between a standing policy that name changes require admin approval, and an admin who doesn't want to deal with it and is actively encouraged to be a capricious jackass about everything. I miss that.
Stuff like this is kind of why I didn't want to drag in PA as the typical example board. It's only relevant to note that this is a piece of kit that's been honed and forged in the fires of a 4chan-grade community.
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TL;DR it's a policy issue not a technical one.
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I don't see what the big deal about changing usernames is anyway.
(get it)
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Is it up yet?
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Ye- nooooooooo... :>_>:
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STOP CHANGING YOUR NAMES.
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STOP CHANGING YOUR NAMES.
Golgo 13 with a mustache.
Er. I mean +Mongrel.
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Look! Here's a good replacement for Karma for Vanilla! (http://vanillaforums.org/addon/voting-plugin)
Vanilla seems to allow name chages? Here's a plugin that keeps track on the userpage, Steam community style. (http://vanillaforums.org/addon/alias-plugin)
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I swear to god if we drom karma in favor of post ratings...
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Sandbox version of Vanilla is up (on this machine) at http://sloth.brontoforum.us (http://sloth.brontoforum.us).
You may notice that it currently looks and acts a lot like some kind of shitty Facebook. We'll see if that can be fixed, or if we just need to casually push it into a volcano and go back to the drawing board.
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Topic creation works.
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Username can only contain letters, numbers, underscores, and must be between 3 and 20 characters long.
Well... shit.
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I bet somebody with some knowledge of and experience with PHP could make us a plugin to loosen username restrictions, among other things.
(brb, getting PHP knowledge & experience)
((never comes back))
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There's a simple regex you can change apparently, I just haven't managed to find it yet.
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Nevermind, apparently Vanilla has core support for friendly urls, including ones that involve your username. God only knows what a carat, hammer and sickle, or exponent number would do to that.
So, there's one limitation so far, unless somebody uncovers a plugin to fix that cleanly.
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STOP CHANGING YOUR NAMES.
I'm sorry! I have to! :;_;:
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FYI, Vanilla isn't set in stone yet.
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It's fast. I like that it's fast.
...can I see the admin panel?
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You can now.
You can also change your avatar. Apparently brontoforum.us was missing a package.
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It's fast. I like that it's fast.
Do we think that'll change once we make it not-so-barebones?
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Okay if this thing really won't support offsite/gif avatars via at least a plugin then I'm going to need another suggestion, stat.
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Out of curiosity, what's the issue with having only hosted avatars? Bandwidth? A general indication of a lack of/difficulty with customization?
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Image uploads were used in the past to screw with our shit, and they're redundant given that anyone can get a webspace here and host their images the normal way, un-GD-fucked.
Also, they apparently break animations, though I think in certain cases people might not complain too loudly.
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Also, they apparently break animations.
:<
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(http://i.imgur.com/dTknm2i.gif)
(http://i.imgur.com/apVWizd.gif)
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Just checked the Discourse sandbox, it apparently has the same restriction. There might be a way to change it but given that the MOD EVERYTHING solution does not actually mod that, I'm not holding my breath.
I think we can use this as a first test to eliminate everything but SMF and phpBB most options.
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FYI, Vanilla isn't set in stone yet.
Mostly I'm pointing out that we had a discussion over changing usernames just a few posts previous ("on the last page" in Thad-annoying parlance), and I had quipped "I don't see what the problem is" considering I haven't changed my name in approximately ever.
I mean, there was that time where everyone got turned into Robot Masters, but I can't remember any other time this community has known me as anything but R^2.
And now there's a tech restriction and are you really going to install a custom namespace package for one guy that's absurd so I'm going to have to pick something else to go by. That's funny to me.
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Just checked the Discourse sandbox, it apparently has the same restriction. There might be a way to change it but given that the MOD EVERYTHING solution does not actually mod that, I'm not holding my breath.
I think we can use this as a first test to eliminate everything but SMF and phpBB most options.
RIP all cool things.
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I mean, this sounds like something we could plugin even if we had to do it ourselves. They make it difficult because, well, unlike us most web forums limit your avatar to small sizes. Which is harder to do when you don't process the file before it goes up.
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And now there's a tech restriction and are you really going to install a custom namespace package for one guy that's absurd so I'm going to have to pick something else to go by.
Make that two though, it chokes on my cedilla as well.
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Man, the up arrow is not exactly a special character, it's actually on the keyboard fer chrissakes.
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Nevermind, apparently Vanilla has core support for friendly urls, including ones that involve your username. God only knows what a carat, hammer and sickle, or exponent number would do to that.
So, there's one limitation so far, unless somebody uncovers a plugin to fix that cleanly.
Caret would be easy to escape. Shit like the hammer and sickle can probably be escaped for URLs via percent-encoding its UTF-8 representation.
Exactly how to do that is left as an exercise for assholes with special characters in their handles. (http://graphemica.com/%E2%98%AD)
There's probably a Vanilla module/setting (http://lussumo.com/docs/doku.php?id=vanilla:administrators:encodings) for international names. I imagine it should cover UTF-8 in general, which will include your hammersicklebidness.
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That's confusing. There's no special characters in my username, but there is in my display name. Is the URL going to use username or display name? Or are they the same vanilla? If not, is there a separate display name plugin?
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Make that two though, it chokes on my cedilla as well.
Considering the cedilla is a legitimate word modifying thing, there must be a way to enable it, so let's not fully discount vanilla yet. But yeah, I can't do "ñ" either.
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Apparently there is no separation of the username from a display name. Lame.
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I mean, this sounds like something we could plugin even if we had to do it ourselves. They make it difficult because, well, unlike us most web forums limit your avatar to small sizes. Which is harder to do when you don't process the file before it goes up.
A search suggests that PA (http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/5275/how-do-i-get-my-avatar) DOES allow offsite avatars. Haven't found out how as yet.
But Constantine's right; it really should be trivial. There's a DB key somewhere that points to a relative URL; seems like all it would take would be (1) changing it to absolute and (2) allowing that to be set in the frontend.
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Well, after sleeping on it (and I god damn needed the sleep; I'd been running on six hours over two days) I came to the conclusion that I'm probably being backasswards about this. If the concern is security then in theory uploaded files ought to be more secure than arbitrary urls. We've only had a problem with it historically because early versions of SMF were horrifically naive about what they did with attachments.
The fact that gif animations get nuked in the processing is probably a limitation of gd and not Vanilla. I'll see if that can be fixed. If not, I'll try to figure out what PA's solution is (probably some custom hack - for as modular as this thing is stopped to be, most solutions seem to involve changing something in the core files).
The name issue boils down to "I need to go drop the display name mod in". Kind of irritating that this thing doesn't have a front-end mod downloader like SMF does, but whatevs.
So that leaves uhh... it's ugly, it enforces gender, and post length requires a hard limit. For obvious reasons fixing that last one is going to be super important. I'll check it out tonight.
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The addon could not be enabled because it generated a fatal error:
Quotes is missing the following requirement(s): Vanilla 2.1a.
You are fucking shitting me.
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FUCK IT
(http://brentai.brontoforum.us/images/tableflip.jpg)
http://stupidity.brontoforum.us
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(http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/misc/rambo%20original.gif)
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PhpBB after all, eh? Huh. Well, it was looking like an uphill battle for the other stuff...
This new one's another testbed which will eventually be deleted, right?
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(http://i.imgur.com/zKjIA9H.gif)
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Apparently we can't have nice things simply because there aren't nice things to be had.
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But we can have nice PDS packages.
IF WE POST OUR PICTURES.
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This new one's another testbed which will eventually be deleted, right?
God, one would hope.
Apparently we can't have nice things simply because there aren't nice things to be had.
In all honesty? Actually using it, I'm finding the only thing at all wrong with phpBB is the fact that it's named phpBB.
I mean if I had to dig for a complaint other than general hand-wringing about security and the fact that we seem to be moving backwards, it would be that the board is actually too flexible, to the point of giving the Admins plenty of rope to hang themselves with. Since this new machine is almost entirely customized though - it didn't come with an AMP stack preinstalled - I'd say that's proper and par for the course.
The general requirement is still "must be better than any other option" though. If you guys prefer to just keep using SMF for some reason, let me know.
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(http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/misc/rambo%20original.gif)
(http://i.imgur.com/zKjIA9H.gif)
wait
is that actually the same guy
this is a pressing question
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Is this gif time i hope it's gif time.
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/123768/forum%20post%20pictures/gif/tumblr_inline_mnt2cyhyNb1qz4rgp.gif)
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Unless somebody requests something different I'm going to leave the sandbox as it is, and assume phpBB is the new normal for our glorious reincarnation.
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With phpBB, is that a situation of archiving the old forums, or can they be imported?
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Importing is possible but I think I'd rather archive anyway. You never can get a 100% perfect conversion. Better to leave an instance of SMF running in its own corner so people can see the old stuff as it was.
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http://fossilrecord.brontoforum.us (http://fossilrecord.brontoforum.us)
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http://crater.brontoforum.us (http://crater.brontoforum.us)
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http://terriblefate.brontoforum.us (http://terriblefate.brontoforum.us)
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http://chicxulub.brontoforum.us (http://chicxulub.brontoforum.us)
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http://dinohattan.brontoforum.us (http://dinohattan.brontoforum.us)
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I like fossilrecord the best so far.
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Might have to go with Dinohattan though.
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I was thinking tarpits.brontoforum.us or amber.brontoforum.us, but damn man. Dinohattan.
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http://cityofraptor.brontoforum.us (http://cityofraptor.brontoforum.us)
No Gods Or Kings, Only Velociraptor
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http://fossilrecord.brontoforum.us (http://fossilrecord.brontoforum.us)
I like this train of thought.
How about fossilized.brontoforum.us?
Edit: Didn't see this:
(currently leaning heavily towards fossilized.brontoforum.us)
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I like this train of thought.
How about fossilized.brontoforum.us?
That was Brentai's initial idea for it. I still think it's the one we should go with.
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Agreed with Fossilized, and if we can, a logo and dinosaur that is skeletal instead.
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Technically I could configure any number of subdomains to point to the same place, but eh.
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Will a filter be run to to change any intra-archive links so that they can still be followed?
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Man fuck ya'll City of Raptor was fucking gold
Dinohatten is pretty great, though. It makes me think of t-rexes in little top hats and turn-of-the-20th century clothes.
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Really? It doesn't remind you of
Dinosaurs For Hire Genesis/Megadrive Gameplay (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtb6lAv5Cgk#)
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Or, you know, what it's a reference to.
Super Mario Bros. (1993) - Welcome to Dinohattan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggiTroAVuDw#)
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I can't believe I forgot the greatest movie ever made
My shame is palpable
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True, I can palp it from here. I'm palping it right now.
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Get your tongue out of my palp
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Such shame is palpatinous.
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A high palpability index.
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(http://pixelatedgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Star-Wars-Emperor-Palpatine-from-Return-of-the-Jedi.png)
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My shame is something some consider to be unnatural
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(http://pixelatedgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Star-Wars-Emperor-Palpatine-from-Return-of-the-Jedi.png)
Welp, joke's done. Congrats.
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And just in time for a new page, too!
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Wait, why did we (meaning Terra I guess) quit using phpBB in the first place, and is it something that's likely to be a problem again?
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He explained it in the channel a couple days ago but, uh, I forget why exactly. People generally didn't seem to like phpBB2 very much and then it got mass-hijacked, so people started liking it a lot less. phpBB3 seems to generally be considered to be way better, and was redesigned from the ground up to prevent something like the phpBB2 mass attack from happening again.