Migrating the forum to Discourse

[ddavidebor]

I can't but notice all the users complaining have thousands of posts each.  You're just used to PhPbb and complaining cause you don't like the sofa to be moved near the window. This is not really a useful discussion.

So what you're effectively saying is "fuck the long time users who contribute heavily and make the forum what it is, we can just ignore what they want because it doesn't matter".

What's stopping you from creating a new forum that is set up the way you want it and leaving this one alone? I haven't seen Dave jump in here yet but it's his joint, ultimately it's his choice what goes and what doesn't.

You lead by example, then you sidestep. Leaders who keep on hanging on their position die hated and alone.

[PlainName]

Ease of install and management

ROFL!

Why do you only officially support Docker?

Hosting Rails applications is complicated. Even if you already have Postgres, Redis and Ruby installed on your server, you still need to worry about running and monitoring your Sidekiq and Rails processes, as well as configuring Nginx. With Docker, our fully optimized Discourse configuration is available to you in a simple container, along with a web-based GUI that makes upgrading to new versions of Discourse as easy as clicking a button.

It's their way or the highway, and even if you do it their way you're basically running blind.

[tooki]

There is one small thing that I see could be improved (and is probably not too hard to do) is easier inclusion of images in posts. Currently if you're attaching images in a post, you have to go some extra manual steps to include them in the post itself, and not just as small thumbnails at the end.

This was improved not too long ago. Unfortunately, the plugins (or possibly the combination of them together; they were never tested separately) used to do this are buggy, and have IMHO made it much worse overall.

From what I've seen, Discourse is horrible. It has gone with that "jumble of text floating in a sea of white" fad that makes it so hard for me to focus on anything.

This x1000. Like, designers, wake up! Visible structure and navigation is a good thing! It's not just useless clutter. (Something which cannot be said for all the social media "engagement" BS.)

The readability is mainly improved by dropping the "pages" for continuous loading.

I personally hate continuous loading. It breaks orientation in space.

I agree a million times over. I HATE continuous loading in nearly all situations. Not only does it break orientation as you say, but if you dare click away, a "back" is almost guaranteed to not take you back where you were.



IMHO, SMF is not a particularly great forum platform. But moving from one crappy product to another crappy product is hardly the answer. If EEVblog did consider moving (which is something I wouldn't really recommend at this point, given that a new version of SMF is supposedly around the corner), it'd be to a better commercial product, not to an open source project. (Open source, frankly, just sucks in some ways, and forum and content management systems are one area where they simply don't work well. In this domain, the core projects tend to be barebones, relying on plugins for essential features, but the plugins in turn easily break with updates, or collide with each other, or get abandoned and stop working altogether.)

I can't but notice all the users complaining have thousands of posts each.  You're just used to PhPbb and complaining cause you don't like the sofa to be moved near the window. This is not really a useful discussion.

Woooow. What an arrogant attitude. And you don't even have the basics right, since EEVblog doesn't run on PHPbb. (As I allude to above, I don't like PHPbb, but this is different software!)

Successful forums rely on long-term members. Their input matters. I have seen a software change completely destroy an online community that had tens of thousands of users. It is NOT a change to be made lightly, especially not in a mature community like this one.

So for you to dismiss these very real concerns as "moving the sofa"? Vafanculo, dude.

[ataradov]

You lead by example, then you sidestep. Leaders who keep on hanging on their position die hated and alone.

What this has to do with technical merits of this discussion?

If everyone starts to hate classic forums, then they'll naturally move to something else. There does not seem to be the problem at the moment.  Only benefits really. All homework kids go to stackoverflow.

Again, give us examples of big technical forums on Discourse. I personally don't actually think it will scale that well. I would love to be proven wrong.

[tggzzz]

How many websites from the 2000s do you use daily?

I'd use a lot more of them if they still existed, the only one that's still around is http://lamptech.co.uk, I don't use it daily but I still view it as one of the gold standards of web design. High information density, simple and effective layout, quality content and there is not a single bit of irritating cruft that I need to block.

There are dozens of websites that I used to use but have abandoned over the years when they were revamped and went from useful and effective to a bloated unusable mess. If you want to see an example of an absolutely horrible website spend 20 minutes browsing http://komonews.com, that used to be my go-to for local news but I all but abandoned it after several renovations left it all but unusable. Give me the Komo news website from 2001 with up to date content and I'll switch to it in a heartbeat.

You can have it back, just have to buy newspaper again instead of being funded by ads and competing with facebook. But that's another discussion, and it's not relevant.

Que? You are losing the plot!

[tggzzz]

I can't but notice all the users complaining have thousands of posts each.

I can't help but notice that pandering to lazy iPhone-addicted teenagers will bring more 1 post users asking homework tier questions and drive away those who answer them.

Sounds like a win

Exactly!

[ddavidebor]

You lead by example, then you sidestep. Leaders who keep on hanging on their position die hated and alone.

What this has to do with technical merits of this discussion?

If everyone starts to hate classic forums, then they'll naturally move to something else. There does not seem to be the problem at the moment.  Only benefits really. All homework kids go to stackoverflow.

Again, give us examples of big technical forums on Discourse. I personally don't actually think it will scale that well. I would love to be proven wrong.

https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/discourse
Elastic is one of the most important IT companies in the world, i've worked extensively with their stack
https://discuss.elastic.co/
Vue is one of the most popular UI frameworks.
https://forum.vuejs.org/
Ionic one of the most popular frameworks for mobile apps. I've worked with it.
https://forum.ionicframework.com/
https://community.cloudflare.com/
Do i need to talk about cloudflare? they basically run the internet.
Docker is the most important modern technology used in IT.
https://forums.docker.com/
Docker community is orders of magnitudes bigger than EEVblog

[tggzzz]

Even the thanks mechanism on this forum is abused. "Woodz" seems to that every post that mentions him, even if they are implying he is an idiot.

You mean can't see the "Woodz" for the .... 

You might think that. I could not possibly comment.

[amyk]

Ease of install and management

ROFL!

Why do you only officially support Docker?

Hosting Rails applications is complicated. Even if you already have Postgres, Redis and Ruby installed on your server, you still need to worry about running and monitoring your Sidekiq and Rails processes, as well as configuring Nginx. With Docker, our fully optimized Discourse configuration is available to you in a simple container, along with a web-based GUI that makes upgrading to new versions of Discourse as easy as clicking a button.

It's their way or the highway, and even if you do it their way you're basically running blind.

I work mostly in software and one thing that really stands out over the years is how much more unnecessarily complex things have gotten, and the worst part of it is that it's almost all self-inflicted: all the younger ones are drawn in by the marketing wank and don't take the time to understand and think about things, they just slap a bunch of bloated libraries together.

Docker is basically "we've made our software so complex that we can't figure out how you are supposed to install it, so how about we just give you this nicely-wrapped ball of shit instead."


I just noticed the OP is from Italy... maybe the stress of the quarantine is getting to him.

[james_s]

I just looked at all of those and every one of them has that hideous sea of white that makes it almost unusable to me. I can't speak for everyone but if I didn't abandon it entirely I would spend vastly less time here if it moved to that platform.

[ataradov]

Docker community is orders of magnitudes bigger than EEVblog

Huh? Their biggest sub-forum (General Discussions) has 156 topics per month. Most have 0 replies. It looks pretty empty to me.

The community may be bigger, but the forum is most definitely not.

Yeah, that thing is pretty much dead.

[tautech]

It should not be overlooked Dave is always looking at and installed updates to how this forum works and in my time here it has changed massively for the better. Dave's also looked hard at other forum platforms and while some have features he'd like to have here there are too many negatives to want him move away from SMF at this time.

[KaneTW]

Do you see any actual discussion in any of these Discourse forums? It all looks like tech support questions to me.

[ataradov]

Do you see any actual discussion in any of these Discourse forums? It all looks like tech support questions to me.

Exactly. All of those things are 1-2 answer tech support. No actual discussion.

Also, for whatever reason they compress themselves into a narrow column in the middle of the screen.  And then noting fits and you need infinite scrolling.

[tooki]

I work mostly in software and one thing that really stands out over the years is how much more unnecessarily complex things have gotten, and the worst part of it is that it's almost all self-inflicted: all the younger ones are drawn in by the marketing wank and don't take the time to understand and think about things, they just slap a bunch of bloated libraries together.

Well, while I think libraries are critical (and they're nothing new in any way), what does perplex me is how the current design trend seems to be utterly oblivious to usability, despite throwing around the right buzzwords (UX! Usability! UCD! Journeys! Personas!). It's even more baffling that as usability has become an established field, with more and more universities offering it as a major, the actual real-world usability seems to have plummeted in the past 10 years or so, after decades of slow but steady improvement. Like… what are they studying?!? They clearly haven't learned about affordances, discoverability, UI stability (as in "things don't move around and appear and disappear", not crash-proofing), etc.

And this is one reason (albeit not the main one) that I turned my back on the UX industry, and will be starting training as an electronics technician in the fall.

[Monkeh]

You lead by example, then you sidestep. Leaders who keep on hanging on their position die hated and alone.

What this has to do with technical merits of this discussion?

If everyone starts to hate classic forums, then they'll naturally move to something else. There does not seem to be the problem at the moment.  Only benefits really. All homework kids go to stackoverflow.

Again, give us examples of big technical forums on Discourse. I personally don't actually think it will scale that well. I would love to be proven wrong.

https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/discourse
Elastic is one of the most important IT companies in the world, i've worked extensively with their stack
https://discuss.elastic.co/
Vue is one of the most popular UI frameworks.
https://forum.vuejs.org/
Ionic one of the most popular frameworks for mobile apps. I've worked with it.
https://forum.ionicframework.com/
https://community.cloudflare.com/
Do i need to talk about cloudflare? they basically run the internet.
Docker is the most important modern technology used in IT.
https://forums.docker.com/
Docker community is orders of magnitudes bigger than EEVblog

Elastic and Cloudflare are on similar scale (for activity, at least, not quite so much content yet). The rest are all tiny.

Your magical wappalyzer is causing you to conflate views from search engines with actual users.

[ataradov]

Elastic and Cloudflare are on similar scale (for activity, at least, not quite so much content yet). The rest are all tiny.

Elastic has a lot of new topics, but most seem to have 0 replies. This probably correlates with the popularity of the product. They all look like drive-by posting. The same person will never return back.

And the only people that seem to respond are actual employees, so it is again a just a support forum.

I would really like to see a generic community-run forum. Not a forum for a product.

[Monkeh]

Elastic and Cloudflare are on similar scale (for activity, at least, not quite so much content yet). The rest are all tiny.

Elastic has a lot of new topics, but most seem to have 0 replies. They all look like drive-by posting. The same person will never return back.

And the only people that seem to respond are actual employees, so it is again a just a support forum.

Perhaps so, I only skimmed the stats.

Interestingly he neglected to mention one site from his magical wappalyzer which is actually an active community: https://community.home-assistant.io/
At over a thousand posts a day across the last 30 days, it's genuinely quite active. A lot of it is support requests (then again, what are electronics questions?), but it's a fairly active project with a lot happening.

[PlainName]

https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/discourse
Elastic is one of the most important IT companies in the world, i've worked extensively with their stack
https://discuss.elastic.co/
Vue is one of the most popular UI frameworks.
https://forum.vuejs.org/
Ionic one of the most popular frameworks for mobile apps. I've worked with it.
https://forum.ionicframework.com/
https://community.cloudflare.com/
Do i need to talk about cloudflare? they basically run the internet.
Docker is the most important modern technology used in IT.
https://forums.docker.com/
Docker community is orders of magnitudes bigger than EEVblog

Are there any threaded forums? IMO that's one thing that would massively improve a web forum, but it would have to be the default view to make everyone use it. The ones I've seen on the web have universally been rubbish, even very good ones using an OLR are rubbish when they hit the web.

[tooki]

I just noticed the OP is from Italy... maybe the stress of the quarantine is getting to him.

And now suddenly changed to UK!

[KaneTW]

I work mostly in software and one thing that really stands out over the years is how much more unnecessarily complex things have gotten, and the worst part of it is that it's almost all self-inflicted: all the younger ones are drawn in by the marketing wank and don't take the time to understand and think about things, they just slap a bunch of bloated libraries together.

Libraries are fine. IMO the reason why Docker is needed is that Linux deployment is absolutely awful.

Let me give you an example. I'm working on a VR window manager for Linux, as a future improvement over multi-monitor setups. Getting it into something users can install easily across all platforms was a nightmare due to version incompatibilites. We ended up using Nix to create a defined environment, but even that was not without issues. (Docker doesn't work since it's a graphical app)

For comparison, Windows is much more backwards compatible and you can ship local versions of the required libraries without conflicts.

[Monkeh]

I work mostly in software and one thing that really stands out over the years is how much more unnecessarily complex things have gotten, and the worst part of it is that it's almost all self-inflicted: all the younger ones are drawn in by the marketing wank and don't take the time to understand and think about things, they just slap a bunch of bloated libraries together.

Libraries are fine. IMO the reason why Docker is needed is that Linux deployment is absolutely awful.

Let me give you an example. I'm working on a VR window manager for Linux, as a future improvement over multi-monitor setups. Getting it into something users can install easily across all platforms was a nightmare due to version incompatibilites. We ended up using Nix to create a defined environment, but even that was not without issues. (Docker doesn't work since it's a graphical app)

For comparison, Windows is much more backwards compatible and you can ship local versions of the required libraries without conflicts.

Linux deployment is just fine if you document your requirements and design your application for packaging by the distribution. You are not meant to take responsibility for the packaging and the security mangling of the entire platform as the developer of a single application.

Shipping local versions of libraries is how you ship your customers security vulnerabilities free of charge.

[Whales]

Discourse forums are horribly slow on my laptop, this style of static forum is much faster and easier.  The addition of the 'all pages' button has made my day, letting me open a lot of topics and read on the train.

An old forum is a good forum -- that means it's past the bathtub curve   Any problems that this forum's software may have are eclipsed by the problems a new forum engine will bring.  New website engines are like new cars.

[JPortici]

The readability is mainly improved by dropping the "pages" for continuous loading.

fuck continous loading.
You want all pages at once? there's the "All button"

It has a structure where users progressively and automatically gain power as they gain engagement and respect from the community. Of course, the real power is in the hands of who controls the software.

sounds like reddit or stackexchange. it works soooooooo well
fuck that.

[KaneTW]

Linux deployment is just fine if you document your requirements and design your application for packaging by the distribution. You are not meant to take responsibility for the packaging and the security mangling of the entire platform as the developer of a single application.

Shipping local versions of libraries is how you ship your customers security vulnerabilities free of charge.

Sure, that works when you're working with a mostly stabilized ecosystem, not when you're on the bleeding edge of software. When Ubuntu 18.04 ships an outdated, unsupportable version of a library and Ubuntu 19.10 breaks a critically required application it gets virtually impossible to get end users past the installation stage.

Also, end/desktop users are a lot less patient when it comes to installing things compared to power users setting up a server.