It's time for a decision...

Justin Baldock · Post by **Justin Baldock** » Sun Feb 27, 2022 10:41 pm

For many years I was a helper, donator, regular forum poster for iDevGames.com, a Mac dev site from the late 90s. It is still around, but it's a shadow of its former self, moved to discord and the vast wealth of info from the forums is gone. We had problems running the site's regular patching, getting hacked a few times because we didn't patch fast enough. Also, we would only have a few people who knew the website content engine or forum. When one of those people went silent, it made things difficult. The problem with open-source I found was our system admin preferred Linux (can't remember which flavour), the DB guy wanted Postgres (at the time MySQL was in vogue), the forum was something else. When things went wrong, getting help was posting a question to a forum and listening to the silence. Not saying it will happen, but I'm suggesting a commercial product with precise requirements and support is a good thing worth paying for. Too many choices/configs in a multi-person run open-source configuration can lead to a system that collapses if a few key people can no longer help. Also, I realise the web/open-source is far different than it was. Just throwing in my $0.02

AndyMt · Post by **AndyMt** » Mon Feb 28, 2022 1:10 pm

How about Discourse as an alternative to phpBB? I don't have a preference, just asking... Looking at the forum landscape it appears that Discourse is the more modern platform - but I don't really know.

I also agree with @Justin Baldocks comment. Maintaining a forum based on open-source software over a longer period is constant effort. Especially if you customize it, I've experienced this myself. Docker containers can mitigate this to some degree. But still updates can break something and then someone has to look at it.

Then on the other hand commercial products come with their own issues. Licensing and cost is one, and sometimes updates break something, too.

So I don't know what's best... this post wasn't really helpful, was it ??

desertfish · Post by **desertfish** » Mon Feb 28, 2022 5:12 pm

Maybe there's a hosting company that uses open source solution but at the same time sells support / maintenance for it . ?

Edmond D · Post by **Edmond D** » Fri Mar 04, 2022 2:21 am

On 2/25/2022 at 3:09 PM, TomXP411 said:

The old forum (Murray2) is available through the "Wayback machine" here. It was taken down as a complete surprise, and even the moderators had no warning. I assume it had something to do with licensing or web hosting fees. Murray2 was also running Invision, so the interface was basically the same.

Personally, I prefer phpBB for several reasons, not the least of which is that it's not controlled by a commercial entity that can yank users around. Invision has already changed their licensing terms and raised their prices, and I prefer not to be held captive to a commercial entity. Mostly, I'm annoyed that we can't take over the license. When someone takes over hosting from me, do they then have to spend another $750 to re-license the software? For something that will be used by a community, non-transferable licenses are unacceptable.

I wasn't aware that Murray2 was an invision forum - it seems different, but that could just be a factor of skins/versions. It seems the actual posts were not archived in Wayback, so the bits may be forever scattered throughout the virtual world.

I agree that open source software tends to be a better long run investment. Being a "captive" customer is never a nice thing, and breaking free before the next crunch is desirable.

On 2/25/2022 at 3:09 PM, TomXP411 said:

Honestly, $800 wouldn't even scratch the surface at my company. I think my time is billed out at more than $200 an hour, and my past data conversion projects have usually been 2 month long projects, working full time. If we were to pay commercial rates, that would mean something like $40,000 - $60,000 for the conversion alone. So it's absolutely not worth it as far as time goes. I do this because I enjoy it and I'm good at it.

Given that you're working for fun and free is very noble - I'm sure everyone appreciates that.

On 2/25/2022 at 2:09 PM, StephenHorn said:

Things I would expect to be more difficult to translate to phpBB would be the Downloads section, its comments, and its associated bits of metadata. I expect that's also where the bulk of the effort will end up going in order to preserve the site's functionality, but honestly I'm not sure if it'll be possible to preserve the downloads, or how the site will manage downloaded content in the future (to say nothing about "try it now").

While the downloads and try it now features are not the core to the forum, they do round out the site. Having an archive of the files as a start would be bearable; the forum forum posts are the real gold for the community.

On 2/25/2022 at 2:09 PM, StephenHorn said:

nd things I expect would not translate to phpBB at all are the individual user "awards" and "achievements", and the "leaderboards". Maybe I'm wrong, maybe these are available in some form via phpBB extensions.

I can live well without the awards/badges/leaderboard or ever the direct messaging system.

Almost mandatory humour -

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Fri Mar 04, 2022 6:44 am

On 3/3/2022 at 6:21 PM, Edmond D said:

While the downloads and try it now features are not the core to the forum, they do round out the site. Having an archive of the files as a start would be bearable; the forum forum posts are the real gold for the community.

The good news is that phpBB does have some sort of download/attachments feature. I haven’t explored it yet, so I can’t say exactly how it works in the back end. But Integrating “try it now” should be mostly a matter of serving a carefully crafted URL.

my only real concern is that it seems like the try it now works by saving the files to the web server and hosting those files in the same space as the web server’s php files. It will require some work on the sever side to make sure that can’t be used as a vector for attack.

Edmond D · Post by **Edmond D** » Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:41 am

On 3/3/2022 at 10:44 PM, TomXP411 said:

The good news is that phpBB does have some sort of download/attachments feature. I haven’t explored it yet, so I can’t say exactly how it works in the back end. But Integrating “try it now” should be mostly a matter of serving a carefully crafted URL.

my only real concern is that it seems like the try it now works by saving the files to the web server and hosting those files in the same space as the web server’s php files. It will require some work on the sever side to make sure that can’t be used as a vector for attack.

I appreciate the response. I do hope that the "try it now" functionality can be made to work securely when the move to phpBB happens.

Given that the content is migrating, the functionality might be possible and the risks with remaining see unfavourable and that we're starting into March now it looks like the switch seems to be justifiable now.

I see that at the time of posting that there isn't enough money to continue with the current forum too

Tatwi · Post by **Tatwi** » Sat Mar 05, 2022 5:14 pm

I've used PHPBB in the past for my own site (more than a decade ago) and it was fine. It's forum software with a SQL database that does all the standard forum stuff. It's also free and regularly update and open source, meaning you are welcome to submit your own improvements and fixes back to the main project.

It's also able to be themed. Here, check out this awesome "1996" theme on their example page.

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/1996/demo/3.2

If that's not historically accurate, nothing is! ?

TomXP411 · Post by **TomXP411** » Sat Mar 05, 2022 11:20 pm

On 3/5/2022 at 9:14 AM, Tatwi said:

I've used PHPBB in the past for my own site (more than a decade ago) and it was fine. It's forum software with a SQL database that does all the standard forum stuff. It's also free and regularly update and open source, meaning you are welcome to submit your own improvements and fixes back to the main project.

It's also able to be themed. Here, check out this awesome "1996" theme on their example page.

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/1996/demo/3.2

If that's not historically accurate, nothing is! ?

THIS. RIGHT. HERE!

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/1982/demo/3.2

Okay... I kid. We would not do this to the board. This does show you how extreme someone can go with the theme, though.

AndyMt · Post by **AndyMt** » Sun Mar 06, 2022 5:20 pm

On 3/5/2022 at 6:14 PM, Tatwi said:

It's also able to be themed. Here, check out this awesome "1996" theme on their example page.

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/1996/demo/3.2

If that's not historically accurate, nothing is! ?

I'm not a fan of pixel-style-fonts in a forum. They are really hard to read. It is kind of ok with this forum here (titles, buttons only), but on Windows these pixel-like-fonts don't scale well, depending on the display you use. I know they look better on a Mac, but the majority uses Windows. So please, at least have 2 themes as options.

Edmond D · Post by **Edmond D** » Sun Mar 06, 2022 6:36 pm

On 3/6/2022 at 9:20 AM, AndyMt said:

I'm not a fan of pixel-style-fonts in a forum. They are really hard to read. It is kind of ok with this forum here (titles, buttons only), but on Windows these pixel-like-fonts don't scale well, depending on the display you use. I know they look better on a Mac, but the majority uses Windows. So please, at least have 2 themes as options.

I agree - while cute I come to read and comment. A second "read-optimized" theme would be my strong preference and that would be the one I'd use.

PS - I'm on a MAC so I can't compare to a Windows platform, nor a *NIX one.