f13.net

after less than 5 minutes of looking

(granted, we'd looked before)

we're strongly considering Discourse

https://try.discourse.org/

please go look at it so you can get your bitching about "change" done in this thread

Xenforo is an option but it's like $500 and I'm not feeling that

also discourse has a dark mode built in

This was the previous discussion:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=25872.0

All I ask for is that it have SSL enabled (and a valid certificate)

What are you trying to hide?

thanks, I hate it

no u love it

can it stop me missing the half of the conversation that's on Discord?

probably not, discord is the best outlet for endless realtime bullshit

irc reborn as not garbage

+1

Infinite scrolling sucks.

Discourse is what you get when someone who doesn't understand how forums work, decides to reinvent forums.

It's fucking horrible.

Yeah, was not a fan of that demo page above.

I guess that means my vote is for Xenforo?   :awesome_for_real:

I don't love it.  BUT I EMBRACE CHANGE.  I'd get used to it, as would most of the the rest of the whiners  :grin:

2am, can’t sleep, reading without my glasses so question I’m too lazy to research, what’s involved in that price?  Their “buy” page is a but opaque.

If I’m reading it right it’s $395 with everything but the stupid $300 no-branding charge, and $205 for renewal?  Some shit lists a base price, some lists a base/renewal, or is all that shit still charged again on license renewal? 

Or it just drives me to stop posting on the forums and go 100% discord.

Change for the sake of Change is a terrible thing.

Is it just the scrolling that bothers people, or what?  We don't ever have shit active that goes beyond a couple of threads within a specific forum, so I don't know why it would matter.  Assuming, of course, we were to keep the separate forums.

This isn't change for the sake of change. SMF is missing a massive number of quality of life features and SMF2 is an vacuous pigsty under eternal development that's yielded a lot of nothing.

No one here would even notice infinite scrolling except in politics.

Cyrrex, we'd obviously keep the separate forums. Click the hamburger on the demo.

Xenforo2 is still an option. It's just a decent bit less polished. Iains take above is pretty terrible.

I'm going to look at smf2.0 since after like 8 years they finally hit RC2 end of March 2019 (and bonus, it upgrades from any previous version).

Edit: there's also something called flarum, but it seems to be in eternal beta like SMF. SMFs biggest issue (like Flarum) is the absolutely glacial development time.

Edit 2: SMF 2.0 is still a QoL wasteland and requires users to build everything that would make for a decent, modern experience. These fuckin guys.

Resetera among others uses Xenforo and I like their forum SW. They even have a dark theme.

The discourse demo page looks rather horrible. The theme is bad and infinte scrolling without thread navigation is basically the fucking worst idea ever if you have threads that are lengthy. I can't imagine how the Trump megathread in politics would even work in such a system or one of the OTs at RE. There's no UI element for "jump to latest reply" in the thread overview (you have to click the post count to get to that) and there's no "down" UI element in the thread view. Also Avatar pictures in the thread overview which I hate.

Also the pricing model for discourse is horrible. They expect you to use their cloud services even if you want to self host (which incurs a $5/month hosting fee with digital ocean) and their own hosting service is $100/$200/$300 per month depending on page views and feature set. I'm always getting suspicious when the "self host" option isn't even documented. At least they mention their key accounts which Xenforo doesn't

After browsing the Xenforo site I'm not sure I would ever buy their SW either.

But I'm using F13 mostly for free so who gives a fuck what I think

I have been part of forum discussions where Jeff Atwood (the main dude behind Discourse) tries to explain what he's doing with it. He is a techbro idiot who believes that social problems have to be solved by tech. Toxic communities, bad faith posters, controversial discussions, etc just need better tools and not better human intervention. As part of the discussion to demonstrate how controversial discussions can be had harmoniously, he cited fucking Stormfront. Unironically. His take was 'Well all of these massive racists are sharing these disgusting ideas, but they are being polite to each other about it." Rather than figuring out that it was like that because everyone on that forum had the same set of disgusting ideas, and that therefore those discussions weren't controversial there, he figure that it was due to the superior forum tech that they were using. He fundamentally does not understand how humans interact.

I use Xenforo2 in a few places and it's probably the best forum experience I've seen recently (as far as feature sets and UX go at least).

I agree with everything IainC said.

For the record, I'm not against a forum upgrade.  I was simply responding to Cyrrex's assertion that change is good and we'll just get use to what ever software you pick no matter how much it bugs us.

If you can find something not ass that lets us do all sorts of extra fun things, then by all means.  Though I really hope whatever software you pick means we can transfer all the posts from the forum to that.  This place is a veritable Library of Alexandria of shitty ancient MMO discussions.  We can't burn this place down.

We're not switching to anything that won't let us keep the content. Don't worry about that.

While this dude is clearly a fucking idiot, it's not really relevant?

I'll look more into Xenforo but their licensing for what you get is horseshit.

Licensing for everything is horseshit though....

It sure is.

Haven't checked the demo yet but beyond anything that we the users see, make sure to check out the backend and what the admins/mods will be seeing and using.  Another forum I'm on switched to IPB years ago and while the boards themselves are fine, I absolutely loathe the admin panel.  Hate hate hate it.  I much preferred what we got with vB for the admin stuff.

I'll check out the demo now.

One thing to keep in mind is that certain visual things like the avatars in the topic list view are presumably easy to change in the theme. Other missing/bad UI things like a missing "jump to latest reply" button can also presumably be added relatively easily. Things that are fundamental to the design like infinite scrolling are probably not so easy to change (if that was there would presumably be a plugin that supports pagination already). However there do appear to workarounds to some of the infinite scroll issues like this scroll bar on the right side on this demo page:

https://try.discourse.org/t/what-happens-when-a-topic-has-over-1000-replies

You can also click on the top and bottom time labels on the scroll bar to jump to the top and bottom.

We would run it on our existing server so there wouldn't be any additional hardware cost to us.

I've been using discourse for over a year now, the online school I use ummm uses it. It's...ok? I dunno, I guess it hasn't bothered me enough to comment. Dark mode is a necessity, so that's cool.

It has a ton of badges and shit to grind on. Yay?

The 'jump to latest reply' is the default when you click on a topic. It seems to heavily base things on 'last visit'. I usually hit Unread (stuff I'm following), then New (uhh), then Latest, in case something fell through those cracks. The topics list will have a little demarcator showing your last visit in the timeline.

I too have been using discourse on various other sites for some time now. It seems to work just fine. I can read other people's words, and then put my words in for other people to read. There are threads.

I would be fine with it.

But what about forum titles?!?

I'll add them if there isn't already a plugin that does.

What about grief titles?  :why_so_serious:

Those too.

I’m all in.

Whichever way.

I assume you're talking about these: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md

No, Discourse isn't affiliated with Digital Ocean (or, well, they probably are but not in a way that matters); the install docs just assume you're a dumb who doesn't know how to Linux so they add hosting as steps 1 and 2 and warn you that that will cost moneys. None of the actual software relies on a DO droplet.

I would, however, have accepted "there's no way to install it without using Docker, gross".

Discourse seems pretty cool. :thumbs_up:

I can't even look at the demo site, it burns my eyes. :drill:

Apparently, Blizzard moved all their battle.net forums over to Discourse.  Here's the WoW forum (https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/) for example.  It's easier to look at an actual working forum rather than a demo, IMO. 

Thoughts :

• I don't particularly like that landing page, but eh, could be worse, I guess.
• I hatehatehate the lack of actual time stamps on posts.  Just having "21d" instead of a real date is stupid.  I shouldn't have to do mental math to see how long ago a post was made.
• The sliding bar on the side isn't too bad.  Could get used to it, I guess.
• I like that it has a breadcrumb trail up top.  Don't recall seeing one in the demo.
• This gives you heathens an idea of what a dark theme looks like.  Where's my damn light theme?
• It's probably the WoW settings, but the text seems overly large, everything in the UI just feels... big.  That's not bad for any quoted text.  Right now the quotes on the forum are too small for me to read normally, so I have to zoom in.

Change is gonna change is gonna change.  Whatever we end up moving to, I'll just deal with it since I'm too lazy to find somewhere else to read and post regularly.  :why_so_serious:

Pick the Dark Theme from the menu on the right from the regular forums:

https://meta.discourse.org/

That's a Ruby on Rails-ism / default behavior that's easy enough to change.

Edit: typo

I just realized how much it reminds me of Basecamp when you mentioned Rails. heh.

So long as there's a fucking mobile view I'm in.

Oh, and grief titties too...

I wasn't aware that was something we had now!

I don't even want to know what "grief titties" look like.

I saw a few on the Florida beach over Christmas vacation.  :ye_gods:

Now I have to add this thread to the 'risky click' at work list.  :awesome_for_real:

It's "greif tittles"  :why_so_serious:

I vote Discourse if development woes are a concern

that or phpBB :grin:

I don't care. If I had to pick Xenforo. But I don't get to pick. As long as it easy to nav and works on mobile and the avatars and names aren't in th header of the post

Xenforo is the closest thing to what we have but what you get for a license is bunk.

Discourse is too web 2.0 for me but that's just me acting old.

the pricing on xenforo is absolutely butt and you certainly don't get something worth the money