Righteous Wrath Online Community

So Lazy and I have been discussing moving RW Forums to another hosting solution and doing some updates at the same time.  One of the items we identified is an option to move to another forum solution (such as Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/)).

We thought we should open it up to discussion, stick with SMF or move to something else?  If something else, what is your suggestion?

Of course if we move we will move as much data from SMF as possible, keeping as much as we can alive with history!

A change is as good as a rest, right?

Discourse is one suggestion as it has a strong update engine / faster more active development. It also has a mobile / touch optimized interface, infinite scroll / loading etc (some of this eventually is coming to SMF).

However it might be off putting in the way it uses tags instead of structured sub-forums depending on if you have encountered it before.

Not strongly pushing for a change of SMF as it is easy to maintain, however it isn't exciting and some of the things like spoilers and embedded previews are native to discuss out of the box which would be nice.

Other suggestions are welcome however I think FREE and easy to patch / maintain are key features before others as that is one of the reasons we moved to SMF in the first place.

Down side / up side there is no tap-a-talk plugin for discuss but it is mobile friendly out of the box and has a number of notification options.

I've never been a huge fan of Discourse, but I can learn to live with it.

How do we ensure privacy on private forums, like the Edmonton Locals one?  With just tags, it seems awful easy to accidentally post personal and private info into a publicly-accessible thread.

Quote from: Thorin on February 01, 2017, 07:56:17 PM
How do we ensure privacy on private forums, like the Edmonton Locals one?  With just tags, it seems awful easy to accidentally post personal and private info into a publicly-accessible thread.

Category Tags have permissions and can be hidden, as with these forums we actually explicitly NAME the private sub-forums (Private) we can do the same for the Category tags so it is clear where you are posting to.

If there isn't much interested in change the forum software that is fine as well.

I'm fine with it staying on SMF then.  Works well enough, and I'm old and cantankerous and don't like change.

Please use the poll to show your interest in change or staying

Quote from: Lazybones on February 01, 2017, 08:49:17 PM

Quote from: Thorin on February 01, 2017, 07:56:17 PM
How do we ensure privacy on private forums, like the Edmonton Locals one?  With just tags, it seems awful easy to accidentally post personal and private info into a publicly-accessible thread.

Category Tags have permissions and can be hidden, as with these forums we actually explicitly NAME the private sub-forums (Private) we can do the same for the Category tags so it is clear where you are posting to.

If there isn't much interested in change the forum software that is fine as well.

I offer a STRONG vote against change. It's not like we have some revenue model and have to "keep up" with all the cool kids and competitors in the marketplace or whatever.

I hope you guys know how much appreciate this forum, never wanted a Facebook or Twitter account so really this is where I keep in strong interaction with you guys (for almost 20 years (!)) and I'm find with how "old school" it may look, it functions 100% perfectly in my opinion. There are other forums over the years that changed their backend and lost a lot of enduring users, I fear a dramatic change to RW would not improve anything important and risk adding obstacles to a place of comfort for me. On the other hand, a site like "twoplustwo" the biggest Poker forum, they have used the same software for more than 10 years and have an insanely large user base, no reason to change to something completely different.

/selfish

PS: selflessly speaking, if staying here is practically zero maintenance then stick with what we know :) And it's critical to have full control of "our stuff" instead of letting 3rd parties host anything imo -- if that was even a consideration. Privacy when needed is simple to set up and maintain too right?

Again, I vote

• No Change.
  
  
  LOL -- I posted above in {Grunch Mode}, then I read the others.
  
  

  Quote from: Thorin on February 01, 2017, 09:01:01 PM
  I'm fine with it staying on SMF then.  Works well enough, and I'm old and cantankerous and don't like change.
  

  
  Yup. Succintly articulated.
  

If maintaining SMF is a pain in the ass for the peeps who maintain this shizz for free on their own time then change it

Otherwise eh

Quote from: Mr. Analog on February 03, 2017, 05:15:18 PM
If maintaining SMF is a pain in the ass for the peeps who maintain this shizz for free on their own time then change it

Otherwise eh

Well SMF still pushes out security updates regularly but the main development of NEW things is really really slow these days, the next release has been in beta a long time.

Moving the hosting means rebuilding the web-server and core components, so it is a good time to consider other software in case it runs on different foundations. SMF is MySQL / PHP.. Discourse is Docker based and uses Ruby and Protgres.

But this is why we put it out there as a post to get feedback.

Quote from: Mr. Analog on February 03, 2017, 05:15:18 PM
If maintaining SMF is a pain in the ass for the peeps who maintain this shizz for free on their own time then change it

Otherwise eh

Thank you RW admins for your thankless job. I hope you have never felt under-appreciated.

And I hope you never make such a stupid decision as Amazon now has done re. IMDB Message Boards...

http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement

Quote
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb's message boards on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.

Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb's social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb's editors and one another. IMDb's Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/imdb) and official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imdb) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (https://www.snapchat.com/add/imdblive), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/imdbofficial/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/imdb), and Tumblr (http://imdb.tumblr.com/).

Because IMDb's message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they'd like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.

IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another. We will continue to enhance our current offerings and launch new features in 2017 and beyond that will help our customers communicate and express themselves in meaningful ways while leveraging emerging technologies and opportunities.

SUCH BS.

Half of the VALUE of IMDB when Amazon bought them out WAS the user community within the Message Boards.

And just like how "Jump The Shark" got bought out then its value soon removed, ditto for IMDB (just took a lot more years).

I mean, how much $ does it cost to maintain a working-fine-as-it-is forum community?

"message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience... Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb's social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb's editors and one another."

In other words, they are tired of ass-hats spamming within their OWN resources, so will rely on 3rd parties to deal with the crap that will always be present BECAUSE INTERNET.

Oh well, "TWO WEEKS" is plenty of time for decades+ user content to be "archived" in random ways... presuming folks even hear about this. You've got 9 days remaining...

Ok so We'll wrap up the decision here by Friday.  You can change your vote, so if everyone could take a look at alternatives to SMF like Discourse to really help us Admins out with an informed decision, that would be awesome! 

Reminder today is the last day to change your vote.  I hope everyone has taken some time to really look at what is out there.

A brief search just now leads me to believe I don't know enough about the subject to make a useful suggestion. I would have to try various forums out and do some compare/contrasting.. Which I don't really have the spare (brain) cycles for :(

I voted yes previously and I'm kinda leaning no now, mostly because of the security concerns Thorin mentioned and also the conversation about iMDB forums, I'd hate to lose my bad jokes from 12 years ago

Without knowing specific software it is still valid to say, HAY this other site has really nice forums etc. It isn't too hard to figure out what they are using.

Looks like it will be a simple migration of what we have.

Quote from: Lazybones on February 10, 2017, 02:55:50 PM
Without knowing specific software it is still valid to say, HAY this other site has really nice forums etc. It isn't too hard to figure out what they are using.

I don't hang out on many forums. Really just this one regularly now.

Quote from: Tom on February 10, 2017, 03:12:21 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on February 10, 2017, 02:55:50 PM
Without knowing specific software it is still valid to say, HAY this other site has really nice forums etc. It isn't too hard to figure out what they are using.

I don't hang out on many forums. Really just this one regularly now.

Same here, the other ones I used to be active on both died

There is no wrong answer here, so if staying with SMF is what you want then so be it.  And if you don't have the time to investigate, then so be it, pick with your gut.   Lazy and I will go with the majority on this.

I dont mind SMF at all.

what ever makes things easier on you guys is ok by me.

Seems us busy folks say Stick With What You Know. Less unpredictability too.

Interesting Info:

Database Backup uncompressed for this site: 140M
Attachments for this site (user Uploaded): 2896 files, at 1.15GB
Website consists of: 11000+ files

Quote from: Melbosa on March 09, 2017, 05:09:13 PM
Interesting Info:

Database Backup uncompressed for this site: 140M
Attachments for this site (user Uploaded): 2896 files, at 1.15GB
Website consists of: 11000+ files

110% COMEDY GOLD