General > General Technical Chat
Migrating the forum to Discourse
SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: Black Phoenix on April 26, 2021, 04:55:57 pm ---
--- Quote from: Bassman59 on April 26, 2021, 04:34:29 pm ---
I snipped most of your message but I need to ask: did you write it on a smartphone, or did you use a computer?
Because I think that the vast majority of this forum's users access it using a standard web browser on a standard computer, not through an app or mobile browser on a smartphone.
You simply can't write a detailed response with, perhaps, graphics and images on a smartphone.
Anyway, one wonders whether the Discourse developers bothered to submit their product to actual usability testing. Actually, I don't wonder. Because if they did, their software wouldn't suck.
--- End quote ---
I use both the Smartphone, the Laptop and a Tablet. It depends of the situation, were I am and what is close by. Regarding writing an message with image links (IMG) and text on a Smartphone, is possible but time consuming, but I've done sometimes. But yes, most of the time I access this forum via PC, so it doesn't bother me that much.
--- End quote ---
I use smartphones/tablets primarily to consume information, not for content creation (other than short messages). I suspect most people do that, unless all they have is a phone.
james_s:
--- Quote from: Black Phoenix on April 26, 2021, 03:48:28 pm ---My opinions are meh, I don't mind. It is true that "dinosaurs" like SMF, phpBB and vBulletin simply work and have a lot of development years plus a wide implementation on the WWW. But is also true that their layout is dated compared with the new trends, specially for mobile.
--- End quote ---
Screw trends. So many of the challenges we face in tech these days are caused by people obsessed with change for the sake of change, to keep up with the changing winds of fashion and it's a complete waste of time. What's wrong with "dated"? What does that even mean? Is the wheel "dated"? Are levers and pulleys "dated"? To me stuff that has been around a while and serves the purpose for which it was designed is "tried and true", it works, it does the job, it has withstood the test of time. Quit screwing with it just to keep it looking new and trendy, if you want to do that with your pet project go right ahead but when it's a tool that thousands of people use, leave it alone unless it is actually broken.
Interacting with something like a forum on mobile is a painful experience, I don't care how trendy the interface looks. I'll do it in a pinch when all I have available is a phone, but 99% of the time I want to use it from a computer with a proper keyboard, screw mobile, certainly don't make it the primary focus. It may make sense to focus on mobile if your site is for kids or middle aged women but technical people who wish to contribute meaningfully are overwhelmingly going to primarily use a proper computer.
Ranayna:
I already have mentioned this at the start of this thread when it was first posted, but i think it bears mentioning it again...
If there ever is a migration planned, please take a look at Xenforo.
This is a classic forum software that is also very mobile friendly. At the same time though it does not loose the look and feel of a forum.
MarkMLl:
--- Quote from: drussell on April 26, 2021, 02:14:38 pm ---The EEVblog forum has an index, so if one were to point a recursive crawler at it, (probably some incantation of something like wget -r -k -p https://www.eevblog.com/forum,) you should get a local mirror of the whole forum. This obviously doesn't let someone "continue" the forum but does provide a static archive of a site if it were otherwise disappearing completely.
--- End quote ---
Not nice. Not /at/ /all/ nice.
Now granted that I've not put any real amount of effort into this since /if/ this had to be done I'm sure it would be to help Dave out rather than trying to do it from outside, but I've not found a way of getting a message in isolation and every page that comes back comprises multiple messages in iframes... but the message number /is/ preserved.
It would be possible to do something like piping the wget response into a script which broke it up and saving each message precisely once, but getting full coverage of the messagebase would still be uncertain and there would be a vast amount of redundant data transferred: I'm seeing a 1/4Mb response to a request for a single message.
MarkMLl
MarkMLl:
--- Quote from: Ranayna on April 26, 2021, 08:04:43 pm ---I already have mentioned this at the start of this thread when it was first posted, but i think it bears mentioning it again...
If there ever is a migration planned, please take a look at Xenforo.
This is a classic forum software that is also very mobile friendly. At the same time though it does not loose the look and feel of a forum.
--- End quote ---
Except that it's similarly based on PHP and MySQL, so is presumably subject to the same scalability issues as pushed Arduino off SMF (unless "felt really old" is their only justification).
/If/ I were tackling this and wanted to do a proper job, I'd rough out a semi-automatic PHP-to-real-language translator with PostgreSQL as a backend and then go looking for venture capital.
MarkMLl
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