The forum, its present and its future

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

digitalscream said:

If anyone wants to keep an eye on (or laugh at) the progress...

https://bitbucket.org/digitalscream/thefretboard.co.uk/

Pretty bare at the moment, most of the work has been hacking around with the data in Vanilla to get the public content working. Next step is importing PMs, and after that I'll work on roles and permissions.

By around Thursday, I should be in a position to get started on the actual views and controllers.

That brought back some unpleasant memories of the band website which is running on cake (an RoR inspired php port).
Im sure its great when you use it often but when you only look at the thing once every year or so then convention over configuration is a royal PITA.

Yep, I can understand that. However, when you spend all day every day in the Rails world, it's a wonderful thing.

Interestingly, in setting this up I've realised that I haven't actually started a new project from scratch in about five years. Along with the whole "convert Vanilla's data into a sensible structure" thing, it's taking me a while to get going...

mrkb

I don’t want my username porting over - I’d rather sign up with a new one. Especially now there’s been a precedent set that allows people to do that.

digitalscream

mrkb said:

I don’t want my username porting over - I’d rather sign up with a new one. Especially now there’s been a precedent set that allows people to do that.

There has to be a really good reason for it, a long way beyond "I fancy a change". That's been the policy all along.

EDIT: Also, the only cases where we've ever done that are for very new users (<10 posts) or people who've been banned and come back after a year or so of contemplation for a clean break. The former doesn't really apply, and I'm guessing you don't want to go down the route of the latter...?

crunchman

Sporky said:

If you need any bits written in mediocre Visual Basic For Applications let me know and I'll look it up on Stack Overflow.

Where would the world be without Stack Overflow?

VBA is horrible.  I've used it a lot, because it's often the only way to get things done where I work.  The IT department normally block us from using anything that would be more suitable.

We can now remote into some servers where they let us run Powershell scripts.  Again, that's less than ideal, but it's less bad than VBA.  There was something my old boss wrote in VBA that used to take over an hour to run.  When I re-wrote it in Powershell, it took about 5 minutes.  With what I know now, I could probably shave another minute or two off of that if I had an hour or two to go back and tweak the code.

My gripe with VBA isn't even how slow it is.  It's just how bad it is as a language.  It helps if you use things like Option Explicit so you have to declare your variables properly, but any language that gives you 5 elements when you declare an array of 4 elements should be banned.

Rant over

I get where Digitalscream is coming from.  If it's your own code, and you know how it's built, you can often get a lot done for very little effort - and at least he can use the right tools.  He's not forced to use an abomination like VBA for something that really should be done using something better suited.

thumpingrug

digitalscream said:

If anyone wants to keep an eye on (or laugh at) the progress...

https://bitbucket.org/digitalscream/thefretboard.co.uk/

Pretty bare at the moment, most of the work has been hacking around with the data in Vanilla to get the public content working. Next step is importing PMs, and after that I'll work on roles and permissions.

By around Thursday, I should be in a position to get started on the actual views and controllers.

Wow,  that meant absolutely nothing to me, but loved the comments.  Jeez must be some sort of code I suspect.  

viz

octatonic said:

Lee if I was you I would have announced the new forum software after you had already built it.
That way you could have said 'I am thinking of building a new forum from scratch', then everyone piles in and says it cannot be done.
Then a week later you present the finished article and BLOW EVERYONE'S TINY FUCKING MINDS with how incredible your coding ability is!
Missed opportunity there, fella.

He’s been working on this since 2014. 

digitalscream

Well, now. It's been so long since I've started a dev project from scratch. It's really quite liberating. I'm actually starting to enjoy coding again, after just a couple of days of noodling around with no pressure.

Also...compared with the blob of shite that is Vanilla, the data access is fucking lightning quick. I always thought the performance issues in Vanilla were down to the sheer quantity of data that we had, but this has totally proved that wrong.

To put it in context...with a properly-designed database, I'm pulling back three-page threads with all the comments, user records and auxiliary data in less time than input latency in my audio interface, and that's without any caching or deliberate optimisation.

I'm really quite optimistic about this.

Emp_Fab

Now @WYNIR0 is back too....  @digitalscream ; -  If anyone knows what's going on, you do.  Confess.....  There is NO WAY that so many old members would suddenly all turn up at the same time just by chance.  @WiresDreamDisasters - have you got a hand in this ?

I'm not objecting - it's great to see the old crew coming back.... I just want to know that I'm not going mad !

m_c

Emp_Fab said:

 I just want to know that I'm not going mad !

Going???

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

Now @WYNIR0 is back too....  @digitalscream ;; -  If anyone knows what's going on, you do.  Confess.....  There is NO WAY that so many old members would suddenly all turn up at the same time just by chance.  WiresDreamDisasters - have you got a hand in this ?

I'm not objecting - it's great to see the old crew coming back.... I just want to know that I'm not going mad !

Dude...seriously, I know nearly-nothing about this. I had a hand in one of them coming back, but that's it.

I'm not complaining either...it's great to see so many familiar usernames around the place

WiresDreamDisasters

Emp_Fab said:

Now @WYNIR0 is back too....  @digitalscream ; -  If anyone knows what's going on, you do.  Confess.....  There is NO WAY that so many old members would suddenly all turn up at the same time just by chance.  @WiresDreamDisasters - have you got a hand in this ?

I'm not objecting - it's great to see the old crew coming back.... I just want to know that I'm not going mad !

A bunch of them also post on the Guitar Buddies Facebook group that I setup last year. Someone did announce I was returning to tFB over there, so that might have something to do with it. But there was no cloak and dagger discussion about it. I'm glad to see faces return as well.

PolarityMan

Emp_Fab said:

Now @WYNIR0 is back too....  @digitalscream ; -  If anyone knows what's going on, you do.  Confess.....  There is NO WAY that so many old members would suddenly all turn up at the same time just by chance.  @WiresDreamDisasters - have you got a hand in this ?

I'm not objecting - it's great to see the old crew coming back.... I just want to know that I'm not going mad !

I think it might be more to do with who left

Emp_Fab

You mean Tony ?  I didn't think he was unpoplier on the whole.

digitalscream

OK, this line of thinking could go to a not-so-happy-place. How about we don't, just in case?

Emp_Fab

How dare you accuse me of thinking !

Heartfeltdawn

Fretwired said:

Should we go with the flow and have a woman in charge ... I mean it's good enough for Doctor Who ... it would keep all the middle-aged , pale, male and stale types in line .... :-)

We could make it a condition of his return that Drew has to wear female clothing relating to a particular theme on the last Wednesday of the month. 

This month the subject matter is Beyonce. 

Jaycee

digitalscream said:

If anyone wants to keep an eye on (or laugh at) the progress...

https://bitbucket.org/digitalscream/thefretboard.co.uk/

Pretty bare at the moment, most of the work has been hacking around with the data in Vanilla to get the public content working. Next step is importing PMs, and after that I'll work on roles and permissions.

By around Thursday, I should be in a position to get started on the actual views and controllers.

Looks pretty good so far, all basic stuff.......... ......... now where's that dark room.

WYNIR0

I'm just back because of the Facebook group. Not got much time for fora these days. Nothing cloak and dagger. Though I do like to stick my dagger in Drew's cloak. 

octatonic

WYNIR0 said:

I'm just back because of the Facebook group. Not got much time for fora these days. Nothing cloak and dagger. Though I do like to stick my dagger in Drew's cloak. 

I imagine it is quite velvety.

EricTheWeary

WYNIR0 said:

I'm just back because of the Facebook group. Not got much time for fora these days. Nothing cloak and dagger. Though I do like to stick my dagger in Drew's cloak. 

Euphemism?