Discussion area

Discuss the LLORG's and HTLAL forum's past and its future here.
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basica
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Re: Discussion area

Postby basica » Mon Jul 20, 2015 11:23 am

It's not free, but IP Board does a pretty good job of this, a few forums I either used or moderated over used IPB and I'd say the voting aspect of the forum was pretty decent, and overall the forum software is much better than the software that HTLAL used, but unfortunately it is paid so that is a bit of a downside.
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Re: Discussion area

Postby Serpent » Mon Jul 20, 2015 11:59 am

Iversen wrote:However it has not escaped me that the possibility to put thumbs up or down has become ubiquitous one the internet,

I hope HTLAL will never have a thumbs down feature.
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Re: Discussion area

Postby rdearman » Mon Jul 20, 2015 5:01 pm

lone wolf wrote:
Iversen wrote:As for the voting system.. well, I have got my share of votes on the old forum, but I wouldn't see it as a priority. However it has not escaped me that the possibility to put thumbs up or down has become ubiquitous one the internet, and you probably can't avoid having something like that.


PhpBB doesn't have a built-in voting system. There are extensions available that add this functionality, but I haven't seen any that I really liked. Last time I looked was one year ago, so maybe something has changed since then. What I've seen is that these voting systems most of the time are implemented in JavaScript, which unfortunately is the default these days for everyone who hasn't got a clue what he is doing, i.e. 95% of "web developers".

The voting system on the old forum was quite unique and the best feature of the package, because it displayed the link for casting a vote and the response message in an iframe. I've never seen anything like this in any other forum software. Technically this is the best solution, because it even works when everything is locked down in the browser for safety and speed reasons.


phpBB is opensource... so if you got the skills? I don't personally have the skills, if I wrote it then it would be implemented in C & assembler. :)
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Re: Discussion area

Postby emk » Mon Jul 20, 2015 5:15 pm

Serpent wrote:
Iversen wrote:However it has not escaped me that the possibility to put thumbs up or down has become ubiquitous one the internet,

I hope HTLAL will never have a thumbs down feature.

Yeah, most forums have actually settled on just two buttons: "Thumbs up / +1" and "Report / Flag". Basically, if something breaks the forum rules, you can report it to the moderators. But you can't just click a button to tell somebody you don't like their post, because, honestly, if you don't like it, you should probably either explain why, or bite your tongue and say nothing. I don't think "-1" buttons actually contribute very much to a community, especially a forum like this one.

In general, I think we should start by trying restore the features we actually know work well in practice for this community, and not make any huge changes right away. Then we can try small improvements carefully. It would be a mistake to just pick out any old voting system and add it to the site just because it was easy. Communities deserve good tools.

rdearman wrote:phpBB is opensource... so if you got the skills? I don't personally have the skills, if I wrote it then it would be implemented in C & assembler. :)

I can deal with PHP just fine, except that it makes me cry sometimes. :-)

I've spoken to rdearman about making the site source available on GitHub somehow, so that people can propose changes and he can decide whether or not to accept them. We have some pretty good programmers and devops folks in this community.
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Re: Discussion area

Postby lone wolf » Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:01 pm

rdearman wrote:phpBB is opensource... so if you got the skills? I don't personally have the skills, if I wrote it then it would be implemented in C & assembler. :)


Yes, I could have a look and see what is feasible. Over the next four weeks it might be difficult to get serious, because I am going to move to another place and start a new job. After that it should be possible to try out a few things and see how it works.

There are a few issues that need to get sorted out. Firstly, it should be clear whether we stick with PhpBB or try to get the old forum software upgraded to the current version. Secondly, if we make the decision to use PhpBB, additional functionality must not get in the way of version updates, otherwise we would soon be in a similar situation as with the old forum. The extension interface of PhpBB may not reach deep enough to write an efficient voting system. (I'd have to check this out first.) Data used by extensions probably gets written into separate tables, not into additional columns of the main tables of the forum. This would mean that each DB request would have to join more tables in order to retrieve the votes for each post. This could have an impact on the performance that is not acceptable for a large forum like HTLAL. It seems that on the old forum new votes are put into temporary tables and some background process distributes them later when the traffic is low enough. This is why the sum of votes in the thread view is not correct right after you vote for a post.

To cut a long story short, the fact that PhpBB does not have a voting system may be due to the fact that you cannot easily add an efficient system later if you haven't planned it right from the start. It definitely is an interesting subject to look into, but as I wrote above, probably not in the next four weeks.

emk wrote:I can deal with PHP just fine, except that it makes me cry sometimes. :-)


PHP makes everyone cry.
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Re: Discussion area

Postby emk » Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:34 pm

Happily, phpBB has hundreds of third-party plugins. We have to be careful which ones we choose, though, because adding lots of plugins can make it nearly impossible to upgrade the software. (This is what happened to HTLAL, as far as I know—the administrator customized it extensively in some very cool ways, and his customizations didn't work with newer versions.)

For example, here's a Post Love plugin that might work. Here's a Thanks for posts plugin.
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Re: Discussion area

Postby Zireael » Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:37 pm

UniLang uses phpBB too and they have tons of plugins, e.g. an on-screen keyboard for that case when your computer or tablet just doesn't mesh with the language you want to use.

Also their code is open source: https://github.com/proycon/unilangforum
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Re: Discussion area

Postby emk » Mon Jul 20, 2015 7:32 pm

Zireael wrote:UniLang uses phpBB too and they have tons of plugins, e.g. an on-screen keyboard for that case when your computer or tablet just doesn't mesh with the language you want to use.

Also their code is open source: https://github.com/proycon/unilangforum

Wow, that's great! Thank you for finding that. I'll definitely discuss that with rdearman.
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