Odd forum software?

topdog91

Hi all, well I'm wading in after being a member here for a few days, so please take this in the positive spirit it's intended. I'm back in the UK after 13 years away and a long time TGP user, so it's good to find somewhere like here with high-quality discussions in the UK (not saying TGP is always high-quality ).

The forum software seems a little flaky, as if someone had had a pretty good go at coding it up but not had time to maintain it. So far, I've struggled to upload photos either via imgur or copy / paste into the WYSIWYG editor, talking of which said editor highlights the whole line not the previous (next) word when I hit ctrl+shift+left (right) arrow, emails aren't working, some links don't work e.g. can't see which posts I got "wisdom" on and generally things aren't in the expected places compared to other forums that I've used (as much as one does in these days of social media).

Edit: and even when posting a new message, I see a parser error to do with JSON.

As I said, the discussions seem great which will keep me coming back, but the UX is frustrating.

I'm opening myself up to flames here but I'm a tech guy and I don't think all the problems are PBKAC; do other people feel this or am I the weird one? Can I help out at all? I don't even know if this is a for-profit enterprise or pure community.

Tannin

Hi Topdog, and welcome.

It's old, yes. And different - which is, on the whole, a good thing. Most of the "problems" are actually merely differences. For the most part, I like it.

The one thing that really, really needs fixing is the server's failure to send a referer with an image request. This is a major issue as it makes it impossible to host images for display on TFB is a safe and sensible way.  You have to host them such that they are available to all and sundry.

The issue here is that the day that some random Internet tool hot-links one of your pictures in a high-traffic site, your entire hosting account gets shut down for over-use, and you lose access not only to your site(s) but also your email. Disaster! And all because the Fretboard server isn't observing one of the basic conventions. It should be a tick-this-box fix but there doesn't seem to be any desire to do it. 

Further, it also prevents you linking to images on normal, properly configured websites (which routinely check the referer before serving an image) which in turn requires the waste and tedium of uploading a second copy of the image just for The Fretboard.

* Note for pedants: "referer" is correct in this context. The original RFC misspelled "referrer" in 1996 and we have been stuck with it ever since.

digitalscream

Tannin said:

Hi Topdog, and welcome.

It's old, yes. And different - which is, on the whole, a good thing. Most of the "problems" are actually merely differences. For the most part, I like it.

The one thing that really, really needs fixing is the server's failure to send a referer with an image request. This is a major issue as it makes it impossible to host images for display on TFB is a safe and sensible way.  You have to host them such that they are available to all and sundry.

The issue here is that the day that some random Internet tool hot-links one of your pictures in a high-traffic site, your entire hosting account gets shut down for over-use, and you lose access not only to your site(s) but also your email. Disaster! And all because the Fretboard server isn't observing one of the basic conventions. It should be a tick-this-box fix but there doesn't seem to be any desire to do it. 

Further, it also prevents you linking to images on normal, properly configured websites (which routinely check the referer before serving an image) which in turn requires the waste and tedium of uploading a second copy of the image just for The Fretboard.

* Note for pedants: "referer" is correct in this context. The original RFC misspelled "referrer" in 1996 and we have been stuck with it ever since.

For what it's worth, the referer field isn't sent by any server when you view a web page, it's part of the image request sent and managed by your browser. In the case of this site, the instruction to the browser is to accept the browser's default referer policy - which is to say, it only sends a referer when the image is linked with HTTPS.

topdog91 said:

The forum software seems a little flaky, as if someone had had a pretty good go at coding it up but not had time to maintain it. So far, I've struggled to upload photos either via imgur or copy / paste into the WYSIWYG editor, talking of which said editor highlights the whole line not the previous (next) word when I hit ctrl+shift+left (right) arrow, emails aren't working, some links don't work e.g. can't see which posts I got "wisdom" on and generally things aren't in the expected places compared to other forums that I've used (as much as one does in these days of social media).

Edit: and even when posting a new message, I see a parser error to do with JSON.

As I said, the discussions seem great which will keep me coming back, but the UX is frustrating.

I'm opening myself up to flames here but I'm a tech guy and I don't think all the problems are PBKAC; do other people feel this or am I the weird one? Can I help out at all? I don't even know if this is a for-profit enterprise or pure community.

OK, in order...

- Direct image uploads are restricted to subscribers only, because hosting costs money and I ain't rich enough to pay for all the images to be uploaded here forever. There are, however, free alternatives and instructions here.

- Ctrl+shift+left/right - works for me on all my browsers. What browser/OS are you using?

- Things in different places...yeah, can't avoid that

- Emails: you must've had at least one email from the site to verify your email? Have you got your notification preferences set to send you emails? I'd at least see something in the logs for that (even if it failed to send), but I can't find your address anywhere in there.

- Not seeing which posts you've had reactions on...that's a deliberate design decision. There were many discussions with the community, and the conclusion was that while the reactions are useful, giving people the ability to monitor their reactions closely is a gamification step too far - there was a lot of trouble with this in the old days (with members manipulating posts to game the system, and otherwise using it in a manner contrary to the spirit of both the intent and the site), so if you're hoping for this to appear...I'm afraid you're a victim of the history of the community itself.

- Parser error: it's a bug I've been trying to sort for a while, to do with the search functionality, but to no avail...priorities, unfortunately.

Funkfingers

digitalscream said:

giving people the ability to monitor their reactions closely is a gamification step too far - there was a lot of trouble with this in the old days (with members manipulating posts to game the system, and otherwise using it in a manner contrary to the spirit of both the intent and the site)

The Seymour Duncan User Group forum suffered from that. A clique of in-since-the-beginning forumites seemed to be more concerned with amassing Points than contributing anything helpful to other people.

Eventually, the gaming involved one boastful character and the Modmins. They abused their access privileges to change the guy's thumbnail pic, reduce his Points tally and reset his status to Noob. All in fun, they said, after they had teased the guy for two or three weeks.

@topdog91 One thing you will not find on this forum is unsightly, obese White American men, boasting about guns.

Emp_Fab

@topdog91 ;; Yeah, it's flaky.  Yeah, it's annoying sometimes, but, you learn to live with it's quirks.  Nothing is dealbreaking (though getting caught in a quote box when on your mobile gets close to it !).  But, it's free, run by volunteers, it's full of wonderful people that have enriched my life, taught me things, made me laugh like a lunatic and also cry with our tragedies.  This place has kept me insane and I'm eternally grateful for that.

So, accept it is how it is.  It's highly unlikely to change.  Some things are just how they are !

Funkfingers

Emp_Fab said:

So, you've narrowed it down to ten, this time.  

Tannin

Weird! The longstanding referer problem isn't causing any issues for me on a quick test. I was hopeful that (as per @digitalscream's post) forcing HTTPS would fix it, but the ordinary old HTTP is working too, for reasons I do not understand. (Is my server misconfigured now and allowing open slater hot linking? Sigh. I'll track it down later.)

monquixote

In these situations I like to pop up and mention that it was my choice to use Vanilla and lumber @digitalscream ;
 with a horrible PHP site to look after and then I promptly buggered off and left him to administer it which given how much traffic this site deals with is a significant achievement.

The base code this site is built with can only be described as having some "interesting" design choices which make it quite hard to fix things and unless the site starts pulling enough revenue to make it viable to hire a full time dev to rewrite it then that's probably how it will be for a while.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

In these situations I like to pop up and mention that it was my choice to use Vanilla and lumber @digitalscream ;
 with a horrible PHP site to look after and then I promptly buggered off and left him to administer it which given how much traffic this site deals with is a significant achievement.

The base code this site is built with can only be described as having some "interesting" design choices which make it quite hard to fix things and unless the site starts pulling enough revenue to make it viable to hire a full time dev to rewrite it then that's probably how it will be for a while.

To be absolutely fair to you, the only options really available were Vanilla or phpBB, neither of which were especially enticing. There was a Java-based forum that I forget the name of, but I would automatically have vetoed that on the basis that I'm even more allergic to Java for web projects than I am PHP.

Discourse was an option, particularly since it's written in my native language (Ruby), but back then the hosting requirements for it were obscene. Unfortunately, as things are now, it's impossible for us to move to Discourse because the import/conversion crashes at every stage - our data is just too big for it to handle (I've tried many times, I've even tried to fix it for them, and that's just another rabbit hole with spikes at the bottom).

monquixote

digitalscream said:

monquixote said:

In these situations I like to pop up and mention that it was my choice to use Vanilla and lumber @digitalscream ;
 with a horrible PHP site to look after and then I promptly buggered off and left him to administer it which given how much traffic this site deals with is a significant achievement.

The base code this site is built with can only be described as having some "interesting" design choices which make it quite hard to fix things and unless the site starts pulling enough revenue to make it viable to hire a full time dev to rewrite it then that's probably how it will be for a while.

To be absolutely fair to you, the only options really available were Vanilla or phpBB, neither of which were especially enticing. There was a Java-based forum that I forget the name of, but I would automatically have vetoed that on the basis that I'm even more allergic to Java for web projects than I am PHP.

Discourse was an option, particularly since it's written in my native language (Ruby), but back then the hosting requirements for it were obscene. Unfortunately, as things are now, it's impossible for us to move to Discourse because the import/conversion crashes at every stage - our data is just too big for it to handle (I've tried many times, I've even tried to fix it for them, and that's just another rabbit hole with spikes at the bottom).

Yeah, it's a shame it wasn't mature enough at the time.

I use Elektronauts quite a lot and I think Discourse is a really lovely bit of forum software. Kudos to Jeff Atwood.

Tannin

I don't think I've met Discourse and although phpBB is very common and well supported, it lacks the simple elegance of Vanilla. (I'm talking from the point of view of a user here, obviously, not an admin.) Long and the short of it is that I like Vanila.

hollywoodrox

I sometimes see a bit at the bottom that says something was designed by Chris Ireland and I always wonder if it’s the same guy who Built V8 and Rover 3500 trikes 

topdog91

Picking this up as I'm back around here and the software is as teeth-grinding as the people and conversations are good. @digitalscream I'm sure you know your stuff, but I'd be happy to try and help move to Discourse, I don't know when you tried to do it or what the problems were but I like a techie challenge. Somehow I feel we should do something for the long-term health of this place. :shrug:

digitalscream

topdog91 said:

Picking this up as I'm back around here and the software is as teeth-grinding as the people and conversations are good. @digitalscream I'm sure you know your stuff, but I'd be happy to try and help move to Discourse, I don't know when you tried to do it or what the problems were but I like a techie challenge. Somehow I feel we should do something for the long-term health of this place. :shrug:

I appreciate the offer, but Discourse isn't suitable for a reason I haven't mentioned up to now - even if we could migrate the data (which would take a lot of work), its resource requirements at the traffic and volume of data this site gets would at least double the hosting costs. It's not a valid option.

topdog91

digitalscream said:

topdog91 said:

Picking this up as I'm back around here and the software is as teeth-grinding as the people and conversations are good. @digitalscream I'm sure you know your stuff, but I'd be happy to try and help move to Discourse, I don't know when you tried to do it or what the problems were but I like a techie challenge. Somehow I feel we should do something for the long-term health of this place. :shrug:

I appreciate the offer, but Discourse isn't suitable for a reason I haven't mentioned up to now - even if we could migrate the data (which would take a lot of work), its resource requirements at the traffic and volume of data this site gets would at least double the hosting costs. It's not a valid option.

Okay, well if you ever want to in the future, I'm happy to talk about some of this stuff offline and see if I can help in some way. I (naively) feel that if we don't do anything, we might grind to a halt under technical debt. Good luck to all of us.

mo6020

Tannin said:

* Note for pedants: "referer" is correct in this context. The original RFC misspelled "referrer" in 1996 and we have been stuck with it ever since.

Just popping in to say that I'm totally here for references to spelling mistakes in old RFCs lol. That's made my morning. 

topdog91

Well, I'm bumping this as I've become quite a regular forum addict user and it's still painful even once you get to know its quirks. It's just the great people keeping me here, I just had to dive in and edit HTML (again), posting photos has become a meme and it's 2023. I don't understand why we can't discuss this stuff in more detail, I'm happy to help and it would be nice if we could have a meta-discussion about these things, otherwise I can't see how things won't go downhill further as the technical debt builds up. It feels like people don't have enough time to invest which is understandable, but are also not keen for others to help out.  No intent to project negativity and grateful for what there is, perhaps some frustration that perhaps things could be improved and no outlet for that. 

Kurtis

I'm no expert but I really like the way this place works. Any other similar sight I have checked out I've found an absolute chore to use.

This is the only "social" type sight I use. Mainly because it's the only one I can use! 

TTony

Hey @topdog91 - I think we probably all have our favourite moans about the forum, although we've mostly learned to live with them over the years (particularly given the constraints within which it works).

But it'd be interesting to have a tech-aware new-pair-of-eyes perspective on it.

topdog91 said:

The forum software seems a little flaky, as if someone had had a pretty good go at coding it up but not had time to maintain it. So far, I've struggled to upload photos either via imgur or copy / paste into the WYSIWYG editor, talking of which said editor highlights the whole line not the previous (next) word when I hit ctrl+shift+left (right) arrow, emails aren't working, some links don't work e.g. can't see which posts I got "wisdom" on and generally things aren't in the expected places compared to other forums that I've used (as much as one does in these days of social media).

Edit: and even when posting a new message, I see a parser error to do with JSON.

As Nick noted above, the Vanilla platform *is* flaky, but it was the best option at the time and we're effectively stuck as long as the forum remains free to use.
Photo uploading can be done - although it's easier from some hosts and via different devices/OSes than others - but the subscription option is by far the easiest.   There's a "how to" link in my sig, although the hosts (OSes and browsers) do frequently change the way that they work, and I don't re-test the guidelines every month (ie some may not work - shout if you find any that don't).
Emails do work (as long as not blocked by your mailserver?) although you have to work through the config options to trigger the emails that you want.
On laptop/desktop devices you can see who as fretted you, just hover your mouse over the number at the bottom of your post.


I think that covers your previous specifics, but I'd be interested in other observations (that said, it's not *my* dev priorities list!), and we're certainly all open to a discussion around how to make the UI/UX better.

BenSirAmos

Just thought I'd mention, none of the flakiness, bugs, quirks or oddities talked about in this thread have affected my enjoyment of this forum ever. Not a bit. Well done everyone involved.

topdog91

Kurtis said:

I'm no expert but I really like the way this place works. Any other similar sight I have checked out I've found an absolute chore to use.

This is the only "social" type sight I use. Mainly because it's the only one I can use! 

BenSirAmos said:

Just thought I'd mention, none of the flakiness, bugs, quirks or oddities talked about in this thread have affected my enjoyment of this forum ever. Not a bit. Well done everyone involved.

Genuinely happy for all of you that feel this way; apparently others put up with the quirks at best (and how many people are driven away?). This is purely constructive criticism with a desire to make things better, certainly if anyone has examples of 2023 forums with more quirks / bugs I'd love to hear them (then again does it matter?).