Forums are getting old in general… Things are becoming more and more social and in I think forum software lags, especially ours. It’s moving more towards a mobile experience as that’s our primary computing experience these days.
The skinning I did a few months back was an attempt to bring our old antiquated forum into this new world somewhat. We needed a responsive design that could adapt to large and small screens as well as be touch friendly. Google actually prioritizes search results based on a sites mobile friendliness now. This skinning accomplishes all that, though there are issues. The skin doesn’t play well with certain android iterations and can become load intensive in general.
Part of the problem is I feel we’re trying to polish a turd here. SMF, the forum software we use has been around forever and the development gorup for them is slow in keeping up. I’d like to move away from it, but the question is how big of a leap to make?
Two of the next generation forums are Discourse and Flarum. Discourse is the one that’s more production ready with Flarum being the cooler younger brother. They both are “mobile/touch” from the ground up, have social media embedded, ability to compose a post and read at the same time, real time updates to threads, etc. Discourse even allows drag and drop of images into posts.
A key component is they do away with traditional “forums” and instead have categories as tags. So, you can actually cross post in more than one category. For instance if you were creating a post about a newspaper article that talked about multiple sports, you could tag both and it would be seen in multiple spots. They are the future of forums, that is until forums just die out alltogether and are consumed by the Facebook monster.
So, we could go with PHPBB (the defacto standard right now) which would be easy to convert to something down the line. It would be easier to get it “responsive” and with few to 0 issues as compared to the current situation. We could take a leap and go with leading edge (Discourse) or bleeding edge (Flarum). I’d be happy to setup a demo of these with some of our data if anyone is interested in seeing it.
As always, appreciate your efforts to keep this place top flight.
I like your ideas. I personally don’t post as much in the traditional threads as much as I used to… Partly because we have sucked, but I digress… I find the conversation and the banter more entertaining than the diatribe post… Because I’ve enjoyed the shoutbox so much, I’m sure I really miss some items of note in the topic threads, so anything to make those conversations more free flowing I’m all for.
This reminds me, we need to do another fund drive… Kick off Football by kicking Mac a few bones.
The new skin and my android/chrome setups do not play well. Cannot scroll in text windows which is so much more annoying than it sounds. So I feel the pain.
Another forum I have been a part of forever - https://forums.anandtech.com/ was facing the exact same issues you described Mac, and they have upgraded to new software. I didn’t bother checking what they are using now. Still getting used to it. Any chance that’s one of the two you mentioned?
I’m not saying its any good - I don’t know yet. But it does have some social media icons on it, and another thing - it doesn’t bog down too bad with a single advertising banner (if that would help defray costs).
Shoutbox is a huge part of this site. For better or worse. A lot of info gets traded in SB and then disappears. That can be a good or a bad thing. However, I know there are a group of us that would hate to lose the daily hangout that shoutbox has become.
[quote=“NinerAdvocate, post:4, topic:30471”]I’d like to see examples as mentioned above.
Three general comments:
The new skin and my android/chrome setups do not play well. Cannot scroll in text windows which is so much more annoying than it sounds. So I feel the pain.
Another forum I have been a part of forever - https://forums.anandtech.com/ was facing the exact same issues you described Mac, and they have upgraded to new software. I didn’t bother checking what they are using now. Still getting used to it. Any chance that’s one of the two you mentioned?
I’m not saying its any good - I don’t know yet. But it does have some social media icons on it, and another thing - it doesn’t bog down too bad with a single advertising banner (if that would help defray costs).
Shoutbox is a huge part of this site. For better or worse. A lot of info gets traded in SB and then disappears. That can be a good or a bad thing. However, I know there are a group of us that would hate to lose the daily hangout that shoutbox has become.[/quote]
I am aware of your difficulties ;D [font=Verdana][size=2]. I have even spent time at stores testing the site on various devices. The thing I find odd is that I could replicate your experience on a Nexus 6 but on a Nexus 6p and the 5x they worked fine. They were even on the same version of android/chrome.[/size][/font]
[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][size=2]Chat is kind of a baseline requirement for anything we move to. Though, I’d probably not go through integration work necessary for it to throw out some demos…[/size][/font]
[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][size=2]Anandtech uses Xenforo. I’m a longtime follower of the site. Xenforo is what I’d consider the most progressive of the old forum software group. So, it’s kind of inbetween SMF and Discourse/Flarum. It’s a paid license there, which I’m hesitant to go back to. The nice thing about going to PHPBB as opposed to something like Xenforo is that you can shift more easily in the future. A conversion from xenforo to something else could be problematic later on. Anandtech did Vbulletin for a while and it didn’t work out well for them it seemed. [/size][/font]
[quote=“NinerAdvocate, post:6, topic:30471”]If its just me on a Nexus 6… bwahaha. Figures. Thanks for that info.
I trust your judgment Mac, but I think people would like to see some examples of what the site could be, before they chime in.[/quote]
LOL, makes no sense I know. I also tried the Samsungs and noticed there that the Chrome browser had issues, but the non-chrome browser was fine. Technically they should have been using the same rendering engine or you’d think.
I’ll work towards a couple of demos: PHPBB with a responsive skin, Discourse, and possibly Flarum. Flarum is the one I want to use, but I’m affraid it’s still too early to use them given where they are maturity wise.
Other than NN.N, I spend a lot of time on UrbanPlanet.org, CSNBBS.com, and CarolinaHuddle.com. Urban Planet and Carolina Huddle both use Invision. I really like that platform. It has the live updating threads that you mentioned and the ability to drag and drop files in replies to share.
Invision is built on PHP, so you may already be familiar with it.
Most of the time in Chrome I cannot scroll up or down with my mouse wheel on here… The scroll bar on the right is very skinny on NNN which makes it difficult to click and drag.
It’s your generation’s fault for teaching us to click and drag.[/quote]
lol, I have the same issue with scrolling. Also, wish the “mark all posts read” button was at the top of the screen. I’m done complaining for the day as I very much appreciate all that Mac does for us Niners.