Forum system migration and wiki host migration
Unfortunately to add to the tally of what happens where there isn't a true community and instead just a corporation behind open source ... https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39620/higher-logic-has-terminated-open-source-vanilla
... so sooner or later we'll probably need migrate away from this forum system. We won't lose any posts, but we'll probably need to lock the site for a day or so, or run something in parallel to test things out for a bit.
Our wiki has also been running really, really slow recently, most likely due to low quality shared hosting. I think it's finally time to migrate everything to the VPS. So a heads up that sooner or later I'll also be locking the wiki temporarily and doing a migration.
and 6 others.
Comments
I've set up a test instance here: https://community-test.osarch.org/ - feel free to play around. The database is disconnected, so any posts you do there will be later deleted. Just a reminder that email notifications are wired up, so emails will be sent so please stick to testing with new threads.
This new forum system should also be significantly faster (let me know if you also think so). Passwords are not migrated, so you will need to reset your password there to play with: https://community-test.osarch.org/reset - at any time I might reset the DB, in which case you will again need to re-reset the password.
It's a lot more frugal (will elaborate more on that later, my biases showing through here) but we can also do a lot more customisation later, like embedding IFC models. Some features don't exist yet too.
Email sending should also be more reliable now (for those who have complained that they never received things). I realised I messed something up.
Cool, is this a home spun solution, or based on an existing forum code base?
It's home spun, and very, very tiny :)
cool, will you be pushing the code to github, or the like?
We couldn't be an open source community if we didn't have an open source forum right? :) https://github.com/Moult/threadbare
yes, dumb question. :)
cool name.
A big thanks to @brunopostle for testing :) Any other takers?
Left a few comments on the testing server of a few quirks that i ran across.
Also, a few questions/comments...
Would be nice if accounts had a simple profile page too.. to get to know your community. :)
Seems OK, though the proof will be in months ahead. A couple of thoughts on functionality:
1. A "Mark all as read" option,
2. Categories, or rooms. Maybe this was discussed and rejected in the past, but not everyone is interested in all aspects of BIM. No offense meant to anyone in particular, but I could use some of the more deeply technical posts as a cure for insomnia.
Wow, our own forum software sounds great, I don't really like the current one.
But is maintaining our own not a lot of trouble, on top of IFCOpenShell, won't this distract from the actual core development?
We could just self host one of the existing open source solutions like Blender developers did with Discourse at https://devtalk.blender.org , or are we planning some sort of deeper integration?
@sjb007
YES please, make categories meaningful again
Forums aren't complex beasts. They can be, but only if you want to build something generic that you ship out. If it's tailored it can be quite minimal and "set and forget".
Definitely one option is to go with one of the already established scripts, but I have a personal bias that it seems nothing works without Javascript on a text only browser, which means I really, really dislike Discourse :)
For categories, any strong opinions on tags vs strong hierarchies? Or anything so long as you can "just see things related to X"?
For me categories have two problems. First, people need to consistently set them for them to be useful. Second, they are very "woolly" with people able to create their own, making them less useful for grouping. See the current forums list of tags for ample demonstration of the long tail of single use tags.
So I would vote for a stronger hierarchy. It helps that my brain works best with tree structures :-)
As a non-pro around here, I'm probably not best placed to divide up the problem space into sensible categories that would suit the pros.
There is also another big question mark around shifting to hierarchy, and that would be how to migrate/map the existing threads into them.
If possible:
How about an approach where users can either use #tags for transversal (cross-topic) searches or select a predefined category for vertical (hierarchical) browsing?
I tend to support a predefined single-level category or tree that can be updated vox-populi if need arises to avoid over-populated categorization
I'm not sure I'd use categories, but maybe a simple #hashtag system would help. This could be an intermediate step between the current reliance on duckduckgo for searching, versus building a curated category system (or integration of a full search indexer).
I do think that the emoji responses are a big part of letting people know their post is appreciated. Can we see the +1s lined up as 🐇🐇🐇 or something?
A little update that our Wiki and blog (Wordpress) are now migrated to the same VPS that hosts the forums. And as of last night we now have backups running as well. Very sorry for the downtime.
I aim to get the new forum software a bit more polished and aim for a migration closer at the earliest in July, no real rush.