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#1 2024-01-14 18:39:20

wet
Developer Emeritus
From: Schoerfling, Austria
Registered: 2005-06-06
Posts: 3,330
Website Mastodon

This forums software had its last update in 2018. It’s 2024 now.

This forum is powered by FluxBB, the fork of PunBB from the old TextDrive days (methinks).
FluxBB was last updated in 2018, it seems.
Its website has been AWOL since 2022. Looks like it was starting to smell a bit rotten.

It seems advisable to think about the future of our community town square. Flarum comes to mind, which boasts a FluxBB import tool of yet to be tested suitability for the task.

Do you have any viable suggestions?

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#2 2024-01-14 19:04:41

gaekwad
Server grease monkey
From: People's Republic of Cornwall
Registered: 2005-11-19
Posts: 4,277
GitHub

Re: This forums software had its last update in 2018. It’s 2024 now.

The closest actively-supported option that’s touted as a drop-in replacement to fluxBB – and likely lowest workload – is the MioVisman fork: github.com/MioVisman/FluxBB_by_Visman

I’m in favour of new tooling if it’s appropriate. I am mindful that the forum runs on its own VPS with a version of PHP in security support, and that doesn’t sit well with me.

This is a somewhat timely thread considering Posthog are moving away from Slack to their own forum (powered by Strapi). There’s some discussion on Hacker News here: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987383

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#3 2024-01-15 09:07:52

Algaris
Member
From: England
Registered: 2006-01-27
Posts: 557

Re: This forums software had its last update in 2018. It’s 2024 now.

wet wrote #336380:

This forum is powered by FluxBB, the fork of PunBB from the old TextDrive days (methinks).
FluxBB was last updated in 2018, it seems.

It seems advisable to think about the future of our community town square…

There was a brief discussion regarding the forum here back in October.

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#4 2024-01-16 10:13:59

Destry
Member
From: Haut-Rhin
Registered: 2004-08-04
Posts: 4,912
Website

Re: This forums software had its last update in 2018. It’s 2024 now.

I would not mind if a new forum was established. Same form and function, which Phil did a super job on, and port over the user accounts, if possible, but not posts. Content starts fresh.

That should pretty much eliminate any migration headaches, excepting maybe the user accounts. I don’t know.

Meanwhile…

Keep this old forum public-readable/searchable in an archive (for a time) but close it off to new accounts and new posts.

Put a short message at the top of each forum instance about the existence and purpose of the other instance.

Then in the months following, a community-wide effort plays out to harvest whatever usable data exists in the old forum by either:

  1. Editing the knowledge into docs (as we have discussed many times in the history of this project).
  2. Copy/use valid code snippets from old forum in new forum threads when those discussions are continued (the most seamless way of priming the pot, as it were). Plugin/theme discussions, how do I, etc are good examples of where to carry over without dragging the baggage with it (some of those plugin threads are many dozens of pages long, most of which are irrelevant, and some plugins are entirely obsolete).
  3. Let authors/bloggers research it for any nostalgic pieces they might feel compelled to write before the archive ever goes bye-bye. (I can think of one or two topics I might want to do that with).

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We don’t need 20 years of outdated information ever at hand. The vast majority of it is ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial), burning up electricity. And in todays web where data privacy is increasingly important, this would be a good step to addressing that as a web 1.0 platform—clean house.

New arrivals don’t care about it, and most of the old dogs are gone, and those that aren’t probably don’t care about the record anymore either. And for those that do, there’s option 3 above.

2 cents

Last edited by Destry (2024-01-16 10:34:43)

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#5 2024-01-18 14:12:34

Algaris
Member
From: England
Registered: 2006-01-27
Posts: 557

Re: This forums software had its last update in 2018. It’s 2024 now.

wet wrote #336380:

Flarum comes to mind…

From what I recall, the sticking point regarding Flarum is the lack of Textile support.

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