[Aptorian]

As a consequence of the recent downtime, talk about the forums future sprang up again among the desperate rabble stuck on Reddit.

The topic of the forums "health" and future possibilities have been brought up before, I believe in a talk with Xae - But there didn't seem to be much urgency in the talks of what should be done or the need for any upgrades in the near future.

I'll bring up a few concerns and wishes for the forum and hopefully we can have a talk between the Admin, mods and users.

1. First of all, I think it's pretty clear that there's a core of regulars that are here for the long haul, unless something drastic changes. We like this place. It's a calm little oasis compared to the modern trends of social media. We want this place to last for the next hundred years or when ever the singularity occurs and we're all turned in to ones and zeroes.

That means keeping the site well funded and up to date. Is there anything we should be aware of in terms of the forums longevity? Is there anything in the near future that will rock the boat? And if so what are our options?

2. Since we're not going anywhere - What options do we have in terms of improving the site? Is there any new shiny forum technology out there that we're not utilizing that we could be using? For example why is the tweet and video embed function often broken? Why can't we embed gifs? (I know it was banned once because of server load or some such thing) Is there some way to link media directly from Reddit or Facebook? Is there some fun new rep or emoji bullshit we could be playing with?

3. What's the Admin and Mods status? Do you have any desires for the forum? Do you intend to keep running and maintaining order in this place for ever or should we worry about future management?

If upgrading or maintaining the site is an issue in terms of personal time and ressourcess, can we throw money at the problem? Whether it's Silencer and Xae we're supporting or it's some Netrunner from Cyberspace, many of us are earning enough money we can pay to make things happen. If it's needed.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 17 June 2021 - 01:49 PM

[D'rek]

Financially, I'm pretty sure we're doing fine, hasn't been a concern for many years now. This recent downtime was caused by Silencer accidentally messing up the domain forwarding configuration at the registrar's config page, it seems, not a financing problem.

The forum software has been the biggest problem we've had over the last half a decade, though. We run IPB (Invison Power Board) version 3, which is not actively supported by Invision anymore, so any bugs/security holes/etc aren't getting patched anymore and new features aren't being added. There's no way for us to become "up to date" while staying on IPB 3.

We *could* upgrade to IPB 4. I'm not sure how that compares feature-wise to IPB 3... in the past one of the reasons we didn't upgrade was because we had features here that wouldn't be available anymore in IPB 4, but those might have become available since. IPB has become a greedier company over the years, though, and IPB 4 charges money per individual feature plus an annual licensing fee to use the software.

Or we could migrate the forum to a different software altogether, such as MyBB, phpBB, Discourse, etc.

Last time the topic was revisited the IPB 3 software was still holding together well enough and we're such an unlikely hack target that we decided it was "good enough for now" to just keep going as-is. But it's always good to reconsider this position from time to time - the IPB 3 software probably isn't holding up as well as it was back then.

[Xae]

By now, the server has been running for years since the last software update (end of April 2019). It's really just a matter of when the underlying OS will stop being supported by the hardware, which likely won't happen for a very long time.

The hacks are the primary concern. This site is not an unlikely target, unfortunately. It gets enough traffic to be noticed and runs veritably ancient software. Prime target for beginners and script kiddies. That said, nothing seems to have happened since last time. I've completely disabled certain features to defend against vandalism and that would appear to have worked.

IPS are a bunch of wankers but there are other alternatives if you guys one day feel like just starting over on a different platform

[Aptorian]

What if we didn't want to settle for good enough?

What would we gain by upgrading to if not the newest version, then a newer version? Is there some sexy new features? Is there a another version of forum software that blows IPB out of the water? ... I think I'm having a forum midlife crisis.

I'm assuming we have a back-up of the forum since you're not that worried about hackers? I'd still like more security if possible, since I've invested my life savings in forum rep.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 17 June 2021 - 03:35 PM

[Xae]

Well, modern software comes with modern features. But, I wouldn't expect that we'd be able to migrate the reputation system. In fact, migrating anything could be a tall order.

Yes, I've got daily backup enabled.

[Aptorian]

Is there somewhere to look up user features in the newest versions of IPB?


I think losing old book forum content is close to unimaginable.

[D'rek]

The core data - users, topics, posts - should be portable to almost any other forum software we might migrated to. We would export it from IPB3 to a raw SQL database and import it into the new software, which is something any half-decent forum software should be able to do.

Any pictures/videos attached to posts, embedded content like tweets, and add-on stuff like reputation, themes, and the like are much more likely to have problems/not be migrateable. Though depending on the new forum software, some of it might be something we can recreate manually.

Maybe it's worth making a shortlist of half a dozen potential other forum softwares and then doing more exhaustive googling on those particular ones to see what we gain/lose for each choice.

[amphibian]

I don't care about reputation anymore. I would be fine with continuing things as they are due to the stability and ease of use. The primary concern I have is "is this easy for Xae and Silencer to keep going?" and I'm not sure moving to the latest stuff is a demonstrable step forward for that in the newest version of IPB.

If it's easier to upgrade to the newest of some board format due to not having to worry about script kiddies, then I think we'd have an easy time getting the funds together for that. I'd give Tiste a shiny rock that'd been worn down by a river for milennia and Apt a video game, then it'd all be taken care of.

[HoosierDaddy]

Just please keep us off reddit. I like reddit, even for malazan postings. They have some good users there and good stuff.

But this is the community that I want to continue to be a part of moving forward. If we need to move cool, but i no longer care about rep and the unnecessary... perks. I care about the people whose opinions I trust and have gotten to know.

[Aptorian]

amphibian, on 17 June 2021 - 05:45 PM, said:

I'd give Tiste a shiny rock that'd been worn down by a river for milennia and Apt a video game, then it'd all be taken care of.

???

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[Imperial Historian]

We don't have any financial concerns at the moment. If we did we'd ask.

Right now the tech burden is borne by silencer and xae and by my understanding there is no real driving force to switch so unlikely to happen.

I'm still around and intend to ensure the forum stays running, our main weakness is a lack of redundancy if silencer/xae are busy/unavailable. We'll have a chat and see what we can do to fix that in the future.

I think regardless of what happened this community would resurrect in some form or other though, and I'm glad for it!

[Imperial Historian]

Though to be fair this is the first serious outage in a long while, in the past we were down so frequently we had a back up forum in place!

[QuickTidal]

amphibian, on 17 June 2021 - 05:45 PM, said:

I don't care about reputation anymore. I would be fine with continuing things as they are due to the stability and ease of use. The primary concern I have is "is this easy for Xae and Silencer to keep going?" and I'm not sure moving to the latest stuff is a demonstrable step forward for that in the newest version of IPB.

Same here. I don't need the bells and whistles of stuff like rep. Just the chat with you lot is enough for me.

[worry]

Instead of Rep we should have Love Notes, so we can send each other little sweet nothings w/o the +/- of it all.

[Abyss]

Lasers. We need lots of lasers.


...and a shrubbery.

[Xae]

I figure there are two realistic options, phpBB and NodeBB. Migrating all the forum posts should be possible but maybe not particularly convenient. Whatever import tools exist are likely not compatible with a really outdated version of IPB.

[Aptorian]

Xae, on 18 June 2021 - 09:23 AM, said:

I figure there are two realistic options, phpBB and NodeBB. Migrating all the forum posts should be possible but maybe not particularly convenient. Whatever import tools exist are likely not compatible with a really outdated version of IPB.

I have no idea what these services offer the actual administrators but from a user perspective, the two options you link seem like night and day. This might simply be an issue of the skin they are using, but when you look at those two websites own community page, Phpbb looks very old school, while nodebb looks modern and sexy as hell. At least for my tastes. Check it out:

https://community.nodebb.org/

There would be an issue with potential spoilers in some parts of the forum, with the "highlight comment" function it seems to be displaying at the top of the subforums. I guess that could be handled by either switching that function off or just labelling every book forum with a "HERE BE SPOILERS" warning, like we already do.

The ability to "Upvote" individual topics, not just user posts, could be interesting in terms of ensuring the best forum threads become more prominent for users who are looking through our book sections.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 18 June 2021 - 12:04 PM

[Whisperzzzzzzz]

Aptorian, on 18 June 2021 - 11:59 AM, said:

Xae, on 18 June 2021 - 09:23 AM, said:

I figure there are two realistic options, phpBB and NodeBB. Migrating all the forum posts should be possible but maybe not particularly convenient. Whatever import tools exist are likely not compatible with a really outdated version of IPB.

I have no idea what these services offer the actual administrators but from a user perspective, the two options you link seem like night and day. This might simply be an issue of the skin they are using, but when you look at those two websites own community page, Phpbb looks very old school, while nodebb looks modern and sexy as hell. At least for my tastes. Check it out:

https://community.nodebb.org/

There would be an issue with potential spoilers in some parts of the forum, with the "highlight comment" function it seems to be displaying at the top of the subforums. I guess that could be handled by either switching that function off or just labelling every book forum with a "HERE BE SPOILERS" warning, like we already do.

The ability to "Upvote" individual topics, not just user posts, could be interesting in terms of ensuring the best forum threads become more prominent for users who are looking through our book sections.

I don't like nodeBB — at least, by the default theme. It's very much in the same vein as Discourse, which gets a lot of accolades but has a crap UI. Now, if we could reskin the desktop and mobile versions to resemble what we have now, I'd like that.

[Tsundoku]

Ugh that nodeBB one is hideous. It needs clear lines!

It would have to have some kickarse functionality way over anything else for my vote, unless the look can be changed as per Whispy above.

[Aptorian]

But it's so clean and white. It's minimalistic and flashy at the same time!