This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.

Future of Forum

124

Comments

  • I can't for the life of my find a good forum software.
  • Very interesting solution. I like it. It satisfies your need to never have links expire while satisfying your goal.
  • The big reason we want to keep this archive here is that it's MASSIVE. There is a ton of content in this forum, and a lot of it is pretty good. There is terrifying google juice here.

    I wish more people had the moral imperative to preserve information that we do. For someone who's been here a decade or more, imagine a decade from now reading an old thread from past you?
  • I do, with frequency.

    Past me was an asshole.

    Current me is also an asshole, but in a different way.

    Future me, I predict, will find new and exciting ways to be an asshole.
  • Always moving forward into new frontiers.
  • edited December 2016
    I've realized this forum is massive the same time I discovered something else. Whoever provides your search is just awful. Me of a few months ago said "Hmm need new shoes, wonder if someone already did the research for me" I then searched at the top for shoes, 40 seconds of loady wheel later, I gave up and just did the research myself.

    This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.
    Post edited by Naoza on
  • AmpAmp
    edited December 2016
    Rym said:

    The big reason we want to keep this archive here is that it's MASSIVE. There is a ton of content in this forum, and a lot of it is pretty good. There is terrifying google juice here.

    I wish more people had the moral imperative to preserve information that we do. For someone who's been here a decade or more, imagine a decade from now reading an old thread from past you?

    God I looked back at some of my facebook posts from two years a go. What a bellend I was.

    Edit; should add, still a bellend now.
    Post edited by Amp on
  • Remembering all the nonsense I posted not even 5-6 years ago is crazy and enlightening.
  • Past me was moderate Republican, I don't think many can best that.
  • Past me was moderate Republican, I don't think many can best that.

    ... I'm a bit ashamed to at least be in the running.
  • edited December 2016

    Past me was moderate Republican, I don't think many can best that.

    Past me was an ardent fan of Rush Limbaugh.

    Like, 12 year old me.

    I got better.
    Post edited by TheWhaleShark on
  • Hey man, I listened to Glenn Beck's radio show every day at lunch in 2004. Shit happens.

    It's still weird to think of this forum as a place I have been posting on for years. I showed up here in 2010, after having sat down at some point in 2009 to map out my life a bit upon turning 25. There were all sorts of things on this list I made, but I remember a few of them that in retrospect, make me laugh about the inevitability of my existence here:
    - Start listening to podcasts
    - Start going to PAXes
    - Get more heavily into German board games
    - Create online content and participate more in forums
  • Naoza said:

    I've realized this forum is massive the same time I discovered something else. Whoever provides your search is just awful. Me of a few months ago said "Hmm need new shoes, wonder if someone already did the research for me" I then searched at the top for shoes, 40 seconds of loady wheel later, I gave up and just did the research myself.

    This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.

    The search used to work perfectly. It became unusable when Scott downgraded the forum from Vanilla 1 to 2.
  • Vanilla's high water mark was right around then.
  • When I negotiated with Vanilla they gave us the advanced search functionality that was supposed to cost more money. It's clearly not advanced.
  • Running archive on open source Vanilla - success.
  • edited December 2016
    Starfox said:

    Naoza said:

    I've realized this forum is massive the same time I discovered something else. Whoever provides your search is just awful. Me of a few months ago said "Hmm need new shoes, wonder if someone already did the research for me" I then searched at the top for shoes, 40 seconds of loady wheel later, I gave up and just did the research myself.

    This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.

    The search used to work perfectly. It became unusable when Scott downgraded the forum from Vanilla 1 to 2.
    The search was still bad, in fact it seems to be more or less the same from when I used it. If something uses Elasticsearch as its backend just use that. Lucene works much better than most every other search engine I've seen besides Google.

    If Vanilla uses Elasticsearch and I just don't know it then they obviously set up their fields to be fucking garbage.
    Post edited by MATATAT on
  • I don't know what backend Vanilla uses. My recollection is that you could search by thread title or content, and it returned sane results.

    Go ahead. Type "metal" into the search now.
  • Regardless of their back-end, they made a terrible UX mistake.

    Forums should by default search by thread title. That is the primary type of search a user will want to conduct. Everything else is an edge case.
  • Rym said:

    Regardless of their back-end, they made a terrible UX mistake.

    Forums should by default search by thread title.

  • I can not get any of these new forums even running. I even tried Discourse, which I don't like very much, and it won't run. I just follow their tutorials and they don't start. All this shit is garbage. I think Automattic, the people who make Wordpress, are the only people who know how to make web applications that other people can self host successfully. Why don't they make a forum?
  • I've found that the odds of ANY tutorial for ANY web software being accurate began with a 50% chance in 2002 and has dropped at a steady rate ever since.
  • Apreche said:

    I think Automattic, the people who make Wordpress, are the only people who know how to make web applications that other people can self host successfully. Why don't they make a forum?

    They do. bbPress.

  • Rym said:

    Regardless of their back-end, they made a terrible UX mistake.

    Forums should by default search by thread title. That is the primary type of search a user will want to conduct. Everything else is an edge case.

    This is GENERALLY true, but I believe a secondary emphasis on searching through text of forum threads should be emphasized when searching through textual forum data.
  • Rym said:

    For someone who's been here a decade or more, imagine a decade from now reading an old thread from past you?

    Oh god. I just went and read some of my first posts... It's a bit embarrassing, but it's good the archive exists.
  • I vote for Flarum only because it seems very similar to Vanilla.
  • I vote for Flarum only because it seems very similar to Vanilla.

    Couldn't make it work. Might try again. Got Discourse to work, but I'm not happy with it so far.
  • Discourse is almost great, but then it tries to do some weird democratic social experiment nonsense that may not be able to be disabled...
  • What are your complaints with vbulletin? I ran that for several years without any major issues.
  • I got flarum to run. It's actually quite nice, but it's too light on the features. It doesn't even have the ability to manually approve new users. Hell, there isn't even a screen (that I could find) that lists the registered users.
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