Forums Migration

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Crivens said:
Please accept this "Thank You" for the informative posting. These reasons are all too understandable.
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@fonz already told us about the security concerns, and this was not the only drawback of vBulletin.

There will always be people who like the one or other program more. To speak for myself, I hate vBulletin, mostly because of its 'jurassic' look and feel.
 
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Another thing to keep in mind is that our old vBulletin setup was quite heavily customised. Tweaking phpBB to the same extent must be an excruciating ordeal, judging by the amount of profanity that was recently uttered by one of the admins (identity withheld to protect the king, but several words started with the letter F and they weren't "fine", "fabulous" or "fantastic") :h
 
I have a moment of indecision between the "view new posts" and "view unread posts" at each forum visit. One takes longer than the other. I was just wondering if they could be more explicit, as "view only new posts" and "view unread posts including ones you skipped at the last time" or some such terminology. Soon to be noted on the computer monitor though, so maybe a non-issue. Another reason for this post is that I was waiting for an example of a SMF forum to link to here so people could see that it competes against phpBB, but the forum I chanced upon had so many visitors that it would maybe draw traffic away from this site. Its posts appeared at least equal to the ones in this forum, as to formatting, etc.
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
Another reason for this post is that I was waiting for an example of a SMF forum to link to here so people could see that it competes against phpBB
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As said, we're contemplating where to go from here. But if it helps putting a (tentative!) smile on some people's faces: SMF is at least being looked into.
 
vanessa said:
You guys miss my point. I don't state that mailing lists are 'bad' per se. What I'm saying is that the FreeBSD lists are contra-productive by competing with the forum, and a forum does have more advantages compared to mailing lists. I even totally ignored the formatting issue in order to be clear.
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I got your point and provided justification for having the mailing lists. Whether the forums have "more advantages" is subjective. Probably the most important reason for maintaining the mailing lists is that many (most) of the people who use the mailing lists prefer them (for some of the reasons mentioned).
 
jrm said:
Whether the forums have "more advantages" is subjective. Probably the most important reason for maintaining the mailing lists is that many (most) of the people who use the mailing lists prefer them (for some of the reasons mentioned).
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That's a fair point indeed. There are several good reasons why anyone could prefer the forums over the mailing lists or vice versa. But the bottom line is that most developers and other gurus prefer the mailing lists, whatever their reasons might be. In fact, most FreeBSD developers actually do have forum accounts, but many of them haven't made a single post here. Apparently the mailing lists are quite simply a more convenient medium for those folks.

Having said that, I do think @vanessa has a point as well. Once the forums have been stabilised that would probably be a good opportunity to see if some sort of mutual integration can be accomplished: posting mailing list digests on the forums, submitting forum digests to certain mailing lists, combining search facilities, that sort of thing. Right now isn't really the time for that, but I'd say it's something worth further thought.
 
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jrm said:
vanessa said:
You guys miss my point. I don't state that mailing lists are 'bad' per se. What I'm saying is that the FreeBSD lists are contra-productive by competing with the forum, and a forum does have more advantages compared to mailing lists. I even totally ignored the formatting issue in order to be clear.
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I got your point and provided justification for having the mailing lists. Whether the forums have "more advantages" is subjective. Probably the most important reason for maintaining the mailing lists is that many (most) of the people who use the mailing lists prefer them (for some of the reasons mentioned).
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I second this, that's what the developers like and if it's good enough for the developers, it's good enough for me. :)
 
Our forum needs an icon.

We should use the daemon as our forum icon, that will appear in the browser's tabs. §e

I mean the left part of the following picture:
logo-full.png
 
Re: Our forum needs an icon.

I'm not a fan of icons, but in this case you're right. With lots of tabs open, it would be easier to pick out. As it stands there's some kind of bluish smudge in the tab which could be anything. (What is that anyway?)
 
Re: Our forum needs an icon.

OJ said:
(What is that anyway?)
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If I'm not mistaken it's phpBB's default favicon. But what it is? No idea. I squinted real hard at it but still couldn't make out what it's supposed to be.

Anyway, of course we all want our old favicon back and the admins are aware of it.
 
zspider said:
jrm said:
vanessa said:
You guys miss my point. I don't state that mailing lists are 'bad' per se. What I'm saying is that the FreeBSD lists are contra-productive by competing with the forum, and a forum does have more advantages compared to mailing lists. I even totally ignored the formatting issue in order to be clear.
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I got your point and provided justification for having the mailing lists. Whether the forums have "more advantages" is subjective. Probably the most important reason for maintaining the mailing lists is that many (most) of the people who use the mailing lists prefer them (for some of the reasons mentioned).
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I second this, that's what the developers like and if it's good enough for the developers, it's good enough for me. :)
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I'm not sure what the relationship is now between the forums and mailing lists. Do they share content? Does everything posted on the mailing lists get placed in the forums and vice-versa? If not, it should.

Most people who use webmail like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail don't want their mailboxes filling-up with digests or messages. It's just junk, and we already get enough of that already. Forums offer a way out of having to deal with that. Data is kept in one central place, all searchable through Google or whoever. So the scenario is that if you are struggling with a FreeBSD installation for one reason or another, you'll go to Google and do a search for your issue first. This always yields forum hits (at least for me it does).

So forums are critically important for users to solve problems, because you can't avoid corner-cases with FreeBSD installations, and often the documentation doesn't adequately cover special cases. For example, ZFS installation on a machine with one disk. The instructions from @vermaden (below) are way better than what the official documentation has. And Google has picked up on that and given this forum post a high ranking. But the BBCODES are completely messed-up, and interfere with the instructions.

viewtopic.php?&t=31662

The exposed BBCODES issue is something I've noticed quite a lot of in many of my searches of FreeBSD forums. I empathize with anyone who has to deal with this, because it's a train wreck. Forum software is notoriously crappy.
 
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Astonished said:
Do they share content? Does everything posted on the mailing lists get placed in the forums and vice-versa?
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Currently not. I like the idea, though. I'll be sure to bring this up once the forums work properly again (priorities and all that).
 
Yep, I understand. It wouldn't be a small project. It would call for a lot of customized work, a non-trivial backend storage/translation system to integrate the two.

Is it even feasible to consider an automated cleanup of high-ranking (search engine ranking) posts?
 
Hi all,

My apologies for being blunt and ignoring the work done by some to migrate to the new forum but really it is not great :( I went through this thread to understand which part of my brain was missing to not being capable of finding the search option across the entire forum, not only per main section! Is this really per design? It's very surprising to not have the option anymore :(

I read @vanessa's comment on using Google to which I would answer with a 'thanks but no thanks'.

The general rendering/layout is less readable than before.

Again sorry to provide such negative feedback but I really liked the previous version.
 
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boris_net said:
not being capable of finding the search option across the entire forum
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One can get there via the "View your posts" link (which is always available) and then "Return to advanced search". But no, it's not ideal. x(
 
fonz said:
boris_net said:
not being capable of finding the search option across the entire forum
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One can get there via the "View your posts" link (which is always available) and then "Return to advanced search". But no, it's not ideal. x(
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Ok thanks a lot for pointing me at the 'advanced search' page! I just added it as a search engine with a keyword like 'fbsd' so I can search from the Chrome address bar.
 
boris_net said:
I read @vanessa's comment on using Google to which I would answer with a 'thanks but no thanks'.
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Google helps you search both the forums and the lists in ONE go!

If you find the forum search engine uncomfortable, have you already tried [link=http://www.freebsd.org/search/search.html#mailinglists]the lists one[/link]? I did - once! Now I have checkbox paranoia :pP
 
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I know this has somewhat been mentioned earlier but I figured I'd share this anyway. There seems to be something odd going on with the "new posts" list. Well, either that or I'm confused with its function.

I've been away from my PC the whole weekend due to a broken down harddisk and only now did I manage to get my system somewhat back together (a restore from a backup is still in progress).

Now, the thing is that I checked the list of new posts this afternoon using my laptop and I selected only a few messages which seemed interesting (and also responded to some of those). My assumption was that all the posts which I didn't open wouldn't count as being seen.

That assumption appears to be incorrect, and although I'm not sure any more I think it used to behave differently. This evening I logged on using my main PC and to my surprise I didn't see three pages of new posts but only a very small few which easily fitting one page. So apparently just clicking the list seems to make the forum mark those messages as being seen; even though you don't have to actually open and read them, and that strikes me as a bit odd.
 
The "New Posts" link is indeed misleading. One might reasonably expect it to refer to, say, the last 24 hours, or some such time period, but that is not the case. I've discovered that it does not refer to a time period, but is instead referenced to a specific time. One might compare it to the international date line. If you click "New Posts" at one minute after midnight, then a post from one minute before midnight is not considered "new" and it won't be shown.
 
@ShelLuser: it sounds like "Unread posts" might do what you're looking for. In any case, the terminology does seem to be causing a fair bit of confusion.
 
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I specifically put "new" on a note on the monitor, I only wish to choose from posts since the last forum visit, seems to work, if that clears up anything and is accurate.
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
I specifically put "new" on a note on the monitor, I only wish to choose from posts *since* the last forum visit, seems to work, if that clears up anything and is accurate.
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I'm curious what you're referring to. I would like that too. It is how I enter all the Forums that I frequent. However, the "New Messages" does not work like that in my experience. See my post (a couple back) about that.
 
wblock@ said:
We're not ignoring you. It's just that most of us have no ability to make changes to the forum software.
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And I can almost guarantee that those who are able to never even bothered to check the links. People want the functions that were available on the old forum software. All that any of you had to do was check out what was available and ask those who administer if they would add that or even if it could be built and then added.
Person 1: "I like the old blue."
Person 2: "Me, too."
Me: "Here is where to get the tint, base, bucket, and everything else" ::directions::
Person 1: "Did you hear something?"
Person 2: "Nope"

I may be paranoid; but, it seems that no one else in this thread even bothered looking for a solution to make the present forum interact as the old without the security problems.

"I don't like this."
"I don't like that."

Well, you were given a link to look at so you could suggest an add-on you like. Why didn't any of you think of doing that?

Let me do this again: PhpBB has MODS to effect the forum appearance and functions. https://www.phpbb.com/mods/.

Person 1: "Oh shit, You mean we can see what is available?"
Person 2: "Damn, there is a lot. And look, we can build our own modifications to suggest for the forums here."

Me: " Wow, just wow."

Person 1: "Did you hear something again?"
Person 2: " Nope, not at all"

Of course, I was being ignored.
 
The admins currently have very little time, and we haven't even determined whether phpBB will continue to be used at all, so kindly lay off the passive-aggressive self-pity, please. Unless you want my self-pity about how a few simple forum rules and formatting guidelines are being ignored every single day..
 
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