Why was XenForo chosen for freeBSD?

I quite liked maintaining PunBB (now FluxBB) back in my OpenCDE days. Granted I didn't need very sophisticated anti-spam filters so they would likely be inadequate for the FreeBSD forums.

I must admit, I do not like Discourse. It looks really hollow, sterile and doesn't seem to foster so much community.
 
A few alternatives were considered, but it's been so long ago I can't remember which ones. Might be able to find some old posts in the Moderators section.
 
RokeJulianLockhart said:
You're not the sole project to adopt XenForo despite being FOSS (0AD is a good example), but most FOSS projects choose Discourse or phpBB specifically to avoid depending upon proprietary software.
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I think it's all in the last sentence: why avoid depending on proprietary software in the first place when said software can get things done? In my opinion that alone gives you a good first impression as to what the generic FreeBSD mindset really is: "The power to serve...", but without discrimination.

I'm not just saying... take the ports collection; you'll find plenty of closed source and/or even commercial software in there. That, to me, is exactly what FreeBSD is all about... we (generally) don't bother with (IMO lame) politics but would rather focus on functionality, tech; "stuff that works".

Of course that's also only so much true... even though it's not activelly shunned there's always been quite a move to keep GPL licensed software out of the base system, to my knowledge this was even a main force to replace GCC in favor of Clang (a move I quite actively supported myself by being an early adaptor, documenting my findings and I think I even wrote a few guides on how to set up Clang / LLVM before it became official). But once again... no 'discrimination': if you want to keep GCC around or even replace Clang with GCC then you can, even today.

This is just my 2 cents, but if you're so worried about "politics" that you'll even let it affect decisions which directly involve functionality then... maybe it's time for a more impartial look at things. And well, why change for the sake of change, makes no sense to me.

As for Xenforo... I've worked with & administrated many fora software myself, and well... Xenforo has very specific features that others simply don't have. Generally speaking its maintenance is also a lot easier and even more streamlined. Not to mention feature friendly. Fun fact: I've had a (friendly!) interaction recently with an anonymous moderator about "something" which I thought needed their attention. However... I also responded to that situation in a way I always do. Lo and behold: several days later I even got some extra feedback about the afternath of that situation. That's a feature PHPbb simply doesn't have, and it really makes a difference I think. Let's just say that reports have real meaning here, and it can show.
 
Just in case, there is one that looks "modern" and fueled by php, I have no idea how is it in detail but it seems to be an alternative to discourse.
flarum.org

The extensible community framework

Best community software; modern, fast and free. For small to enterprise communities.
flarum.org flarum.org
https://github.com/flarum

Moving from one to another platform must be a really painful task I imagine, once it's done I suppose no one wants to do it often.
All in all I have no beef with XenForo, sure it's not perfect but looking at other choices they aren't that good either.
 
SirDice said:
but it's been so long ago I can't remember which ones.
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Blimey, it's almost 13 years ago (Forums were on phpBB back then I believe)
lme@

Thread 'New Moderator: SirDice'

Dear forum community,

please give SirDice a warm welcome in the team of the forum moderators! :)

No longer just the forum's top poster but now also a moderator to help us keeping our beloved forum free from spam and other unwanted content.

The administration team is happy to have him on board!
  • Thanks
 
kpedersen said:
I must admit, I do not like Discourse. It looks really hollow, sterile and doesn't seem to foster so much community.
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I dislike editing posts on Discourse. I write something, post, think of something else, and instead of a new post I edit the previous. It shows how many times you edit comments (pencil + number), which looks odd.

I have to decide if I want to take the edit mark, and guess how others take it (am I just piling on, is it a useful edit; if the tone was already questionable than maybe I edited it from something worse? Who's really clicking the button and analyzing diffs before forming an opinion? :p)

I've seen 1 out of several Discourse forums have a minor grace period with post edits. Most traditional forums (like current FreeBSD's) have gray edit text below the posts that feels less-judgy.
 
Espionage724 said:
I dislike editing posts on Discourse. I write something, post, think of something else, and instead of a new post I edit the previous. It shows how many times you edit comments (pencil + number), which looks odd.

I have to decide if I want to take the edit mark, and guess how others take it (am I just piling on, is it a useful edit; if the tone was already questionable than maybe I edited it from something worse? Who's really clicking the button and analyzing diffs before forming an opinion? :p)
Click to expand...

Actually I think the way this is handled in discourse is rather professional.

Let's assume you write some technical explanation how to get something working. Then from feedback you figure a corner-case that you didn't consider - and then, for the ease of reading, you improve the original post instead of adding a commentary.
In the meantime somebody else might have linked to your post, from a different thread, from a different forum entirely, or even from a workgroup internal discussion. The question then is, to which version of your howto would they refer?

If we just exchange opinions, then this would be unneccessary. But if we do actual work, e.g. maintain a software,
then it gets important to be able to resolve potential misunderstanings.


BTW: discourse runs nicely on my FreeBSD. It is certainly not supported, and what is worse, it is not even appreaciated from upstream to do such a port. And it's quite a bunch of work, so it would need a few enthusiastic people to actually shoulder it.
 
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