The software options for upgrading dgrin

Baldy

Been digging in pretty deeply to threads comparing Discourse to other solutions...

Reddit versus Discourse: with Reddit you lose chronology of posts because of the upvoting, and being threaded it's hard to keep track of new posts over a month-long discussion because they appear in random places. And Reddit seems to be a race to the shortest, funniest response on top:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/difference-between-reddit-and-discourse/9741

Xenforo versus Discourse: More like VB so less user confusion. I have to admit some things like flat with expandable replies on Discourse take time to wrap your brain around.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/my-latest-forum-but-its-not-running-discourse-heres-why/18533

Finally, there is a lot of chatter that for company support, Stackexchange-like QA software is better, at least to have a section like that with an adjacent discussion forum.

AdamNP

I vote for Xenforo simply to be able to keep all of the history of Dgrin. Unless Discourse has some VB conversion facility available to save all of the old posts, users, etc, I think that would be a terrible thing to lose. I don't post much, but like many others have said, I check here several times a day. When I have a question, I nearly always find the answer in some past thread here (not in the SM documentation). The many years of posts here should not be lost. With Xenforo (and most other commericial forums actually), conversion of the existing database is a pretty simple task.

Richard

AdamNP wrote: »

... Unless Discourse has some VB conversion facility available to save all of the old posts, users, etc, I think that would be a terrible thing to lose....

I'd hate to see all the history go away. Another consideration is how well the new software handles resizing images. Some people still come to Dgrin to discuss photography, not for SmugMug support. Also, as a part-time spam cop here, I'd be interested in what automated spam detection support a new package provides. Not sure we will find everything we want in any single product--perhaps a hybrid solution is needed.

Baldy

AdamNP wrote: »

I vote for Xenforo simply to be able to keep all of the history of Dgrin. Unless Discourse has some VB conversion facility available to save all of the old posts, users, etc, I think that would be a terrible thing to lose. I don't post much, but like many others have said, I check here several times a day. When I have a question, I nearly always find the answer in some past thread here (not in the SM documentation). The many years of posts here should not be lost. With Xenforo (and most other commericial forums actually), conversion of the existing database is a pretty simple task.

No worries, Discourse has a conversion facility. We'd hire them to do it.

I'm still torn between threaded and flat discussions. The beauty of flat is the most recent stuff is always at the bottom. The beauty of threaded is you get to quickly zero in on the part of the thread you're interested in. With vBulletin, our current software, you get to switch modes between threaded and linear. Does anyone do that? It sounds really good on paper, but for some reason I've been just sticking to linear.

With Discourse, it's a strange hybrid. Under any post with replies, you have the option of expanding the replies and reading them right then. But if you do, you'll see them again further down the discussion, because they also appear in chronological order. Not sure how I feel about that.

basflt

Users are used to vBulletin ,
there is nothing wrong w it ,
why change ?

Changes can also done with CSS

Allen

As it is now I just click and it jumps to the next unread response in thread. Can't think of any other
way, you're saying responses will be split up all over the place?

Quotes are also very important in responses otherwise you have no idea of what is being answered.
It's also very important to read back up the whole thread.

Only the tread carries the true title/subject.

Allen

BTW, in our responses now we can add multiple quotes from different posts.

Allen

In the support forums we use [code].. [/code] and it's important html is turned off. Otherwise it'd fire
like these tags I had to bold to fool the forum.

AdamNP

Baldy wrote: »

I'm still torn between threaded and flat discussions.

This is an easy one for me, it's why I like the older style forums. I find threaded to be very confusing for readers, and makes it very likely that people will miss some of the replies.

I really have to put a vote in for just leaving things the way they are. Yes, VB3 is extremely old. But there's a reason you still find a lot of major forums (much larger than this one) still running it. VB4 and VB5 were, frankly, disasters. I only said Xenforo because it would be the closest thing to remaining the same. IMO, the best choice is doing nothing, at least until that day where someone finds a vulnerability in VB3.8.x that just makes it unusable. I'd stick with how things are - but be ready to convert to Xenforo quickly if necessary.

I do understand that Discourse and others like it would likely be better purely for support. But, to be honest, support is far from the main purpose of dgrin. I think it would be a major step down for every type of discussion other than support issues.

ian408

For problem solving, having the best solution on top usually works pretty well but for discussions, it makes the discussion hard to follow.

Allen

ian408 wrote: »

For problem solving, having the best solution on top usually works pretty well but for discussions, it makes the discussion hard to follow.

I've seem a lot of threads that would make no sense without all responses in order.

Baldy

AdamNP wrote: »

This is an easy one for me, it's why I like the older style forums. I find threaded to be very confusing for readers, and makes it very likely that people will miss some of the replies.

I really have to put a vote in for just leaving things the way they are. Yes, VB3 is extremely old. But there's a reason you still find a lot of major forums (much larger than this one) still running it. VB4 and VB5 were, frankly, disasters. I only said Xenforo because it would be the closest thing to remaining the same. IMO, the best choice is doing nothing, at least until that day where someone finds a vulnerability in VB3.8.x that just makes it unusable. I'd stick with how things are - but be ready to convert to Xenforo quickly if necessary.

I do understand that Discourse and others like it would likely be better purely for support. But, to be honest, support is far from the main purpose of dgrin. I think it would be a major step down for every type of discussion other than support issues.

Yeah, I talk to other large forum owners and I own a large one (ADVrider), and pretty much all of us feel we need to do something because forums that don't are stagnating.

You have forums like Reddit (threaded) exploding, Wordpress comments (threaded) going huge, yada. I'm not arguing for threaded, necessarily, but think of all the things we can't do with vBulletin 3 we need to:

- Unified passwords between SmugMug and dgrin (plus facebook, twitter, google and yahoo)
- Responsive design that automatically adjusts to your phone or tablet or web browser
- Notifications when you're mentioned in a post, muting of threads, etc.
- Real search
- Scalable moderation where people who read and post trusted content gain the ability to push out trolls, spammers, bad actors.

To my knowledge, Discourse hasn't been used for support so if we try it we would be the guinea pig... For example, Ubuntu has an Ask Ubuntu section, a support forum section, and a discussion forum. Discourse only runs the discussion forum.

Baldy

Here's a new one being developed for the modern web:

https://nodebb.org/

Here's an example site running it:

http://convoe.com/

Baldy

Allen wrote: »

I've seem a lot of threads that would make no sense without all responses in order.

Yeah, I think that's where I am too. Reddit is enormously successful with upvoting comments so the best rise to the top but it feels like our threads make more sense chronologically.

The most raging debate is between threaded and flat. In flat, newest stuff is always at the bottom so it's easiest to find. But then you have to read every new response and it often is too much noise. With threaded, they're not necessarily at the bottom, but it's in response to a post in the thread that interests you. There are religious wars between the two and enormously successful forums with each approach.

Discourse takes the approach that you can be notified by any response to your post (not just a thread you're in) or when someone writes @Allen. Also, with Discourse, it's linear but any post that has a response has an expander below it so you can just read the responses to that. It takes time to get your head around it, but people seem to like it once they get it. If we do go Discourse, there will be 1,000 exploding heads over it until they get it.

AceCo55

dpreview gives you the choice of viewing threaded in either threaded or flat view.
Personally, I hate the threaded view. I think the flat view which has embedded quotes or @user x allows me to follow the whole thread plus the issues within the thread.

David_S85

Just as a reminder, Dgrin currently offers three basic display modes right now



None of those allow for voting a post up or down, but you can select how to view this forum.

Richard

A useful feature I've seen on other support forums is the ability to flag a post as a solution.

AceCo55

David_S85 wrote: »

Just as a reminder, Dgrin currently offers three basic display modes right now

Learn something new everyday! Never noticed that ... what else am I missing out on

David_S85

AceCo55 wrote: »

Learn something new everyday! Never noticed that ... what else am I missing out on

The secret free latte toggle and pulldown menu. But you have to have 10,000 posts or more to access it.

Baldy

Here's a test thread on NodeBB, which isn't ready for prime time because it's release 0.5:

Image & link handling.

Nice clean layout, tho, huh? It's interesting that the forum expands/shrinks the image in-browser so that it always fits the display.

Hikin' Mike

Baldy wrote: »

Here's a test thread on NodeBB, which isn't ready for prime time because it's release 0.5:

Image & link handling.

Nice clean layout, tho, huh? It's interesting that the forum expands/shrinks the image in-browser so that it always fits the display.

Looks good. I like the nesting too. Does it support [code], [html] etc?

Allen

Baldy wrote: »

Here's a test thread on NodeBB, which isn't ready for prime time because it's release 0.5:

Image & link handling.

Nice clean layout, tho, huh? It's interesting that the forum expands/shrinks the image in-browser so that it always fits the display.

My display driver stopped working and recovered browsing a thread.

ian408

Baldy wrote: »

Nice clean layout, tho, huh? It's interesting that the forum expands/shrinks the image in-browser so that it always fits the display.

There are some nice features. Not too crazy about the way the forum home is laid out but I'd put it on the list of possibilities and would go so far as suggesting a test setup-there are some photo things that would probably be nice to have and maintaining a test bed might get us more of what we want.

julianlam

Hi all,

Julian from NodeBB here. This topic popped up in our daily(-ish) scan of people talking about NodeBB, so I thought I'd pop in and say hello and answer some concerns some of you may have about NodeBB:

- The forum home layout is definitely not everybody's cup of tea. However this can be changed! Our theming system is so extensible that you can even make the default look end up looking like something completely different. Even our next default theme doesn't follow the same design, so the sky's the limit!
- Hikin' Mike -- NodeBB supports Markdown by default, so it's a slight change. Surround text in * for italics, ** for bold, and other fairly intuitive markups.
- Baldy -- we go one step further -- the layout changes based on the viewport size, and this also means NodeBB works great when you're shooting out in the field. No need to double-tap, zoom, etc, just to read the forum, mobile responsiveness is all built-in. We even support image uploading from mobile phones...
- David_S85 - I like free lattes. Would be a great plugin for NodeBB

Baldy

Hey Julian,

Nice to see you here! Impressive, actually. We've been stuck on vB 3.8 for years, been asking ourselves what to do to get mobile responsiveness, notifications, a modern look, better image display, easier signups, and upvoting posts.

It feels like the choice may be narrowing to two: Xenforo, which makes my heart sink because it looks like 2001, and NodeBB. I wanted to say Discourse, but the image handling is a showstopper I think, and it's not pretty. You guys are showing a lot of promise, I love what you've done so far.

It looks like with NodeBB, we'd have to write better image uploading ourselves so it doesn't error out when someone uploads too large an image. I think we would want to do the right thing and resize rather than give them an error message and force them to figure out how to resize.

Thanks,
Baldy

Andy

David_S85 wrote: »

The secret free latte toggle and pulldown menu. But you have to have 10,000 posts or more to access it.

OK I'm waiting for my six free lattes

David_S85

Andy wrote: »

OK I'm waiting for my six free lattes

Must be your browser having problems.

David_S85

Baldy and Julian, a migration question. Would (or can) Dgrin posting history be copied over to NodeBB?

julianlam

David_S85 -- Yes, we have a very complete VB importer that you can use, or we can run it for you for a small fee if doing that kind of technical work is not your cup of tea. User account, posts, topics, and categories are preserved. Each importer is different, but at minimum, those are the bases covered.

Baldy -- I recognize your avatar from our forums, I figured it was you . Image uploading is not optimized for large images, and we recognize this pain point. Here are some thoughts on it:

1. The process ought to be streamlined, and error messages should be more descriptive, I agree.
2. We should expose more options to allow administrators to post-process uploaded images. One of our clients regularly uploads 5M+ shots of birds, which is overkill for digital screens. Having the server automatically resize them down to 720p (or less) would be much more preferable.

It's something we recognize, although it is not at the top of our list of priorities at the moment.

Richard

^^ Good to hear that vB history can be imported.

Question about images: Can resizing be restricted so that images are not upsized beyond the submitted image size? Smallish images could suffer if blown up beyond their original pixel dimensions.

ian408

julianlam wrote: »

1. The process ought to be streamlined, and error messages should be more descriptive, I agree.
2. We should expose more options to allow administrators to post-process uploaded images. One of our clients regularly uploads 5M+ shots of birds, which is overkill for digital screens. Having the server automatically resize them down to 720p (or less) would be much more preferable.

It's something we recognize, although it is not at the top of our list of priorities at the moment.

In #2, do you mean configuration wise? If you look at linked images here, for example, they are scaled down to keep them within the browser window (stretchy). It's not configurable but always on. It's done on the fly and is fairly quick-you also have the option to view full size. Not sure you'd want anything else but scaling as people are pretty particular about their editing. For attachments, image quality is important and it'd be nice to automatically handle those as today, users are sometimes confused by the limitations imposed on attachments.