Use of forum software different to PhpBB

This is more drastic, and may merit its own thread, but what about switching to a more modern forum software like Discourse?

Winckle wrote:This is more drastic, and may merit its own thread, but what about switching to a more modern forum software like Discourse?

That's the one e.g. the Blizzard forums use, right? Yes, that idea is definitely worth a thread. I'll split one out now.

I've no sentimental attachment to PhpBB3, particularly if we break database continuity -- we should at least discuss & consider other solutions like Discourse.

YouTube

It may be time to concede that if we are going to compete with sites like Reddit eating up prospective new users then we should consider features that align with them.

Except for up and down votes. That can strawberry float off. I mean more things like easily sharing images, a better quoting system, proper threading, tools to organise events and other ways to make things we already do that little bit easier.

Discourse is great from what I've used of it. Feels very modern.

Mafro wrote:Discourse is great from what I've used of it. Feels very modern.

Your name actually came up because of the emoji support. :lol:

Minty14 wrote:.

Tagging you in as I know you had a desire to discuss this.

At least some of the plans in this forum are going to intimately involve PhpBB for now, as it's, well, the current package -- it's just inevitable the conversation will centre on it. This doesn't lock us in though. I'm very interested in ways to achieve the same feature requests in Discourse, and if some of them are built-in to Discourse, that would be a decent argument for switching IMO.

I'm definitely an advocate for moving to a new forum platform, and if we end up breaking away from the current db, it's a no-brainer imo. Having taken a look at Discourse, I think it can solve most of the challenges and changes we're looking at, and with much smaller management overhead than phpbb.

I'll see what the general consensus is, and go from there I guess.

I'm currently running a migration of a snapshot of the forum from last week to a discourse platform... Except I severely underestimated how much processing power it would take to import the 10+ years of posts and it's less than 15% done after nearly a week. :lol:

I will try again when I get a chance on a beefier server rather than the low performance rented linode I'm using.

Winckle wrote:I'm currently running a migration of a snapshot of the forum from last week to a discourse platform... Except I severely underestimated how much processing power it would take to import the 10+ years of posts and it's less than 15% done after nearly a week.

I will try again when I get a chance on a beefier server rather than the low performance rented linode I'm using.

I've got an instance set up in my test environment where I work. It's 4/4 at the moment, but I can beef it up a bit more. Drop me a PM if you want to use it.

It's a styling issue, but I like phpBB because it looks and feels like a forum, rather than a comments section or a social media feed.

Most important to me is the preservation of a chronological index and chronological single thread topics, and a lack of upvotes or similar.

OrangeRKN wrote:It's a styling issue, but I like phpBB because it looks and feels like a forum, rather than a comments section or a social media feed.

Most important to me is the preservation of a chronological index and chronological single thread topics, and a lack of upvotes or similar.

Discourse is proper forum software, maybe you are confusing it with Disqus? Karl mentioned before that Blizzard use it for their forums, so I took a look, and it's like a modern version of the classic webforum:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overw ... discussion

See also more examples from their customers page:
https://www.discourse.org/customers

Winckle wrote:Discourse is proper forum software...

Right sorry I wasn't criticising Discourse specifically, I was just stating what is important to me in any replacement

OrangeRKN wrote:
Winckle wrote:Discourse is proper forum software...

Right sorry I wasn't criticising Discourse specifically, I was just stating what is important to me in any replacement

Oh sorry for misunderstanding. I agree that posts should be chronological. I don't see the harm in allowing liking of posts to show agreement. I feel it would help lurkers engage without needing to post.

But yeah, I don't want reddit style re-ordering of threads based on upvote scores.

Does Discourse do the thing where it automatically embeds media like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc without the user needing to put them in tags first? Rllmuk does this.

Mafro wrote:Does Discourse do the thing where it automatically embeds media like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc without the user needing to put them in tags first? Rllmuk does this.

Yes, it'll embed media if you post the URL of it, or it'll display a page summary if you link to a news article etc

Sounds good to me!

OrangeRKN wrote:It's a styling issue, but I like phpBB because it looks and feels like a forum, rather than a comments section or a social media feed.

Most important to me is the preservation of a chronological index and chronological single thread topics, and a lack of upvotes or similar.

+1 Upvote for this.

I've had a look at that Blizzard forum to get a feel for Discourse and I don't like the look of it. But that is probably more because, as established in the "When are you old?" thread, I am middle aged and now becoming unable to cope with any form of change!

Every single Discourse forum I see just looks like a jumbled mess to me. Maybe they aren't getting their settings right but I feel it's style over practicality.

Just an update, I've got a test discourse still importing a snapshot of grcade from May into discourse on a test server. It may take another twenty days of processing to import the posts, but we'll get an idea of what GRcade would look like on a modern platform.

Use of forum software different to PhpBB

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