Opinions on potential to change forum software
G'day all! There has been some suggestions by @dimitar to consider migrating the OSArch forum software from Vanilla to Discourse. I'd like to hear if anybody has any opinions on this change - if there is enough interest and rationale, we can of course make the switch, and if we reckon it makes no difference or if it isn't something to stress too much about, we'll stick to what we have.
Things to keep in mind:
- Be careful when judging based on out-of-the-box visual styles. Visual styles can always be edited on both platforms. In theory, Vanilla offers more styling options than Discourse (we can even embed within a brandable website, which Discourse does not offer), whereas Discourse is a bit more restrictive - but aesthetics can always be changed.
- All forums have plug-in systems. For example, we've recently upgraded the search functionality and added related discussions. If you are interested in an additional feature, we can investigate what's available for both platforms.
- Be aware that we have options when choosing forum hierarchies. For example, right now, the OSArch forums shows a flat hierarchy - we only show the general category, and there is also a Spanish category, but that's it. If we wanted, we can show it in a different way - we can have subforums with categories like more traditional forums, or we can have a table-view with views, commenters, or ... etc. So forum software is agnostic of our discussion categorisation and presentation preferences.
- Be specific with your opinions, it is more helpful to say "I prefer X due to feature Y" rather than just "I prefer X".
- Vanilla and Discourse aren't the only fish in the sea! If you reckon that PHPBB was the pinnacle of forum evolution, please say so!
I'll add my own comments later on in the thread :)
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This is the only web forum I've ever really engaged with, so I have no opinion on different software. What happens to the old posts? there is lots of useful information there, is it a reset and start again?
If we do migrate, old posts will get migrated, so nothing in theory would be lost. There is potential for some hiccups, like mandatory password resets during the migration, and potentially some plug-in data, like gamification (post-reactions) may be lost, or we might write some custom code to migrate those.
Will the new forum let us embed an IFC file in a post using IFC.js?
@brunopostle good question. I am under the general impression that Discourse is generally more "locked down" than Vanilla, so it might be trickier, but I suspect no matter what forum software we use, we can definitely coerce it into supporting custom embedded content.
I have little to say about which platform is best, I've mostly used traditional threaded forums for 20 or so years, PHPP is great, and I've not so much used the newer fancy ones like slack and discourse. But I have some general comments about what I think is important
So it will be no surprise to anyone that I'm thinking about the importance of a structured type of communication that holds a community together and works as a permanent resource.
We discussed at the monthly meeting last night to look at Loomio for discussion that require a decision "A place for your organization’s serious discussions". I expect that would be a separate forum.
similar to @brunopostle this is one of the few forums I have actually engaged with in a meaningful way, so I don't have a opinion much in what software to use. I do really quite like the flat hierarchy as it is and the approach using tags since the threads/categories should be able to evolve organically as @duncan has said.
Off-topic, but @jchkoch this forum uses Markdown, so if you prefix your post with these two symbols
##you are marking your text as a header. This makes your text quite big.I agree with @duncan 's view on categories.
@Moult thanks for starting this discussion. On a weekly basis a use mostly discourse forums, a few phpbb and here, vanilla. I've been on Blenderartists since forever, and the change over to discourse a few years back made me actually enjoy the forum. I have ended up liking discourse quite a bit for a few reasons:
There are a few aspects that I don't like about discourse:
I was a bit taken aback first with the osarch forum. In fact before this iteration, I had a discourse tryout installed before @Moult took over and founded a proper community. Frankly, I didn't know there's anything out there besides the legacy experience of phpbb and discourse.
From the experience here and elsewhere I still prefer discourse for the reasons mentioned above. However, I am getting used to Vanilla. I wonder if there is a way to reply to a specific post within a topic, ability to see first image in topics with images, ability to see images when doing a search, have multiple bookmarks list, and have different ways to watch a topic as in discourse.
my bad @Moult, I'm not too used to Markdown (much more used to org-mode "markdown" syntax.
Also, wanted to add my voice here that I also prefer endless scrolling as opposed to pagination with too many "categories".
I know how that is
How is that different to quote?
sounds interesting. I must find a discourse forum somewhere and get involved.
PS. I just checked and I've been on Autodesk Users Group International forum since 2006... but I've posted more in this forum.
@dimitar thanks for your comments! By the way, have you tried bookmarking threads in Vanilla? You can click the star icon, and near your profile, you can see all your bookmarked threads.
The search was recently improved - what do you reckon? From what I've tried, the upgraded search works well for me. Personally, I am not a fan of Discourse hijacking the Ctrl-F browser search.
Infinite scrolling may be an option in Vanilla, where the user can enable / disable it based on their preference.
Real-time previews are also pretty easy to throw together in Vanilla, I would suspect.
You don't need to quote in order to follow the train of thought. Here is an example from Blender's devtalk forum: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/geometry-nodes/16108/1302. You can see who the reply is from and the whole post pops up without needing to scroll up. I've found that feature to be great at following a specific train of thought
There is also another feature in discourse that I quite like - you can highlight specific text and automatically quote only that text instead of having to quote all and manually erase the rest
Discourse hijacking the Ctrl-F browser search.
Yes, I agree, definitely my least favourite feature of discourse
I just previewed this post, and I also wonder if there is a way to resize images here?
Anyone other than @dimitar have opinions on forum software? If it just a few people who have an issue with the forum software, then I do not think it is worth the investment to switch. In the meantime, here are my personal opinions on things I like about Discourse. I have also listed potential solutions to modify Vanilla's behaviour - because we may be able to get what we like about Discourse without the full effort of switching.
However, here are things I prefer about Vanilla, that make me personally hesitant about switching.
Btw, if anybody wants to check out the list of Vanilla plugins and let us know if there is something there that interests you, we can investigate that too.
I don't have a strong opinion on this, didn't have a strong forum experience before so I do not feel sth is missing or sth bothers me.
I feel though from what been said until now that the current choice is more flexible and customizable in features and brand, which makes me lean a bit on this side.
no strong opinion here, but i also prefer Discourse's email notifications, with embedded posts.
To me maintenance of discourse is something you have to take into account too.
@stephen_l what maintenance are you referring to? I think all software would have maintenance.
Frequent upgrades as every new and popular software is also a vector for attacks - so is wordpress too.
This is very interesting.
The first time I reached this forum I found it was rather dull and was going to suggest you changing it for Discourse. I then thought it was best not to meddle but I think about that everytime I get here. So, thanks for reading my mind.
I ran a Discourse forum for our National Architect's Association elections. We started as a small group of 6 and eventually grew to the needed numbers. The forum was meant to be a way of engaging a discussion between people in our list and voters. In the end we lost. It was not because of Discourse, of course.
After discussing it with them they offered the Discourse site to me as an Opensource account, which is free and setup by them. They are very interesting and very supportive. Support and interaction by email is given by them in their own Discourse Meta forum. If you send them emails the emails are actually going to the forum so the support team reads them in a forum like fashion. Very cool, and great potential. If you choose to reach their own pubklic Discourse Forum, community will give you support too. All are very friendly and fast to respond. The community seems to be very active and a lot of community made plugins are being developed. I don't know if you find that insteresting as you have skills that I don't and can probably assemble the forum yourselves and thus can have more control. For me, I needed nothing else than what was installed by default.
Discourse ran perfectly and the backstage was very easy to configure. I never worried about a thing and everything was always update. As I had everything setup and maintained by Discourse themselves on their servers for free, it was seamless
Any file can be allowed to be uploaded as long as you setup the filters to allow it . I guess uploading an IFC.js will have no issues. Images can be customized too and you can either autocompress them or allow them to have full resolution.
From an admin perspective, the main benefit I found was the Social Media interaction. We had a social media guy that would pick posts that we composed in Discourse and then sent them directly to Social sites like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. There are plugins to make the bridge to the social networks you choose to. This bridge is processed automatically and effectively, linking back Twitter posts or facebook posts, for instance, to the forum automatically. If a post features an image, that image is the base of the external media post. This allowed for a very streamlined and overall nice looking cross posting from the forum to Social networks. It was, for him, the biggest benefit.
I chose discourse because it was the main forum type I was using before and I rather enjoyed it. I like it much more than this one and much more than other kind of forums I before. I used quite a few over the years. From my user perspective, Discourse is the more intuitive and fluid to use that I tried. @dimitar put it very well, but the main user benefits are:
I'd definetely recommend Discourse above all other forum experiences I had.
Keeping a tally:
This suggests to me that it will be a good idea to migrate! Ping @tetov - up for some fun? We might need to do this together.
We'll continue to let the opinions roll in, but in the meantime I propose @tetov and I set up a simple discourse forum and do a test migration. Everyone can use that test system to play with it, as well as form an opinion if you are unopinionated. This will help us make a more informed choice. If nobody objects to proceeding (i.e. we benefit 2 users, I share the load with @tetov, and 5 people are unaffected so far), we tackle relevant migration issues.
Things to expect:
I suppose you've seen this:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-migrate-from-vanilla-to-discourse/27273
It does seem trouble.
And when you're talking about the reactions plugin I suppose it's this one:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-reactions-beyond-likes/183261
The search engine on Discourse also works better than here, imho.
Password migration: There seems to be a plugin for supporting exported password hashes for authentication, so maybe. Need to read up on how Vanilla handled passwords.
Let’s get an instance running and we can test and execute the migration.