Arantor

I'd also note that success is very often a game of 'be careful what you wish for, you might just get it'. In the same way that offices jokingly refer to 'don't be competent and get all your work done, they'll just give you more of it', success has a habit of bringing all sorts of unexpected side effects you never intended. I am very good at solving problems, I have made an entire career out of it. The only problem is that there's solving the problem and there's writing the code to solve the problem, which are not equivalent. I made a career out of both, but I find I end up doing a lot more of the latter than the former, though the former is where the real fun is...

I have collected domains over the years, and some of them I have some weird sentimentality for because despite not using them, and the original project with the name it was bought for long since evaporating for various reasons... I still have domains I don't know what to do with. Firstly, is it just me that has this problem? Secondly, if I said the following domains, what would you imagine they contain? (They all currently contain nothing. Some of these I own more than just the TLD listed here.) enchantedtofu.com unexpected.ly questforstory.org monolithforever.com adventuresinthought.com wordowl.com penfolio.net I don't need to get rid of them but I'm thinking it's about time I had a clean out of things that I'm not ever actually going to use. For example, I currently still own workmonth.com but the service that was going to be has lost the one user I knew I'd have had for it (because they've moved jobs in their company and there's no point building out the full scale service beyond the little silly prototype they were using) (I suppose part of the problem is that I'm in the middle of a multi-month funk and trying to let go of baggage might unlock whatever it is that's been giving me trouble. I am doing this not only for my domains but subscriptions, products in the house I no longer need/want etc. as part of a general clear-out)

Some thought provoking designs in there, for sure. I am still looking - I haven't found what I'm looking for yet but what I'm looking for is... niche to say the least.

If you can't get a few like-minded people to join up early and post... you maybe launched too early.

Yeah, about that, one of the big changes in 1.9 is to completely redo their theme system. I'm not entirely sure what they're doing is going to be a winner.

There's a lot of supposition about what that should look like. Lots of 'we need to make it like social media' except you can't for all the reasons I outlined before - and while you could make it look like social media, the reality is that you're still fighting against the same fundamental problems: you can't be a one-stop-shop for everything because you're not Facebook and no amount of veneer can fix that. End of the day, whatever the presentation, you still have chains of comments that form 'topics'. If you follow the social media route and discard boards, categories or even something more malleable like prefixes, all you have left is somewhere between the most recent and the most active topics. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't care about being able to look back at anything, and for some subject matter, that's absolutely fine. The reality is that the boards, categories, prefixes, whatever, is what gives forums their power. And it sucks to realise that fact, that the single underpinning element is that categorisation matters. Now, how to fix that over time to make it less difficult/less tedious? There's a question we could talk about. On some forums people have difficulty finding the best place to post. (Heck on Reddit some people have difficulty even finding the right subreddit so we know the board analogue is a pain point, but it's the same pain point.) Which means we start talking about things suggesting places, AI categorisation (something it actually should be good at doing) and smarter thinking around how we lay out forums in the first place. I think there's also some room for some clever canonicalisation of content. Think about Stack Overflow for a moment, a question is posed, it might collect several answers and the community (influenced by the question asker) will coalesce towards the most popular answer. Now, the most popular answer isn't always the best answer, and it's certainly possible that the answer will change over time. SO is not good about handling this, but the point stands: the conversation arrives at a conclusion that is the canonical outcome. There's room in forums for something like this, particularly in getting from 'discussing something' to curating the best knowledge from that topic. We see Discourse doing something in this space, around picking out the best items in a topic to give you the highlights as it were, but that also relies on community interaction to help determine that, which isn't necessarily as positive as it might seem. But Discourse prides itself on focusing on the content in a way without the cult of personality that can otherwise happen in some communities, and I'd even give it to CDCK that what they built does that, but IMO at the cost of sucking the personality and life out of the place. There is also something to be said for being a resource site rather than strictly a forum, which changes the dynamic to something vastly more transactional, in that you offer up resources and you might well have indirect conversation in the form of comments on articles, rather than activity in the forum itself. But I think that also plays into what you're hoping to achieve longer term.

See, that's kind of the problem: 'biggest bang for your buck' is notoriously hard to define given that not only do the options I mentioned have cloud plans, but Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB and others also have managed hosting where you just pay per month for the facilities - and it just so happens that you also can download that for your own uses/development etc. And then you have Khoros. Non-self-hosted that's so expensive there isn't a pricing plan on the website, it's literally 'call us' pricing. Which means you can get an idea how much that costs. Ultimately though, the different packages on offer make it really hard to compare - Invision Cloud vs others in particular is a really hard comparison once you get beyond the most basic packages because that offering isn't just a forum, it's the whole kit and kaboodle (forum, blogs, gallery, CMS, courses, commerce)

MyBB always had vaguely vB-knockoff vibes which is part of why it was popular for a time. As for porting styles, you can port a style between anything with a little time and a little skill - I was once running an SMF using a ported (premium) WordPress theme for example, it’s not wildly hard to do if you know how the platform works. I’m not wildly sold on the new theme, reminds me of Flarum in not good ways.

SMF 2.1 started dev in summer 2011 and debuted in final form in spring 2022 with a modest upgrade that was mostly complete years before. It looks like there have been two overall things that have pushed out what 1.9 would become - the reality isn't that there is 'little to show for it' but that what has been done isn't exactly minor. Thing 1: major overhaul It's been a while since I did any MyBB theming but it looks like they've shifted the entire process over to Sass rather than classic CSS, plus Twig rather than classic templates, they've completely overhauled how themes work which will be hugely interesting for all the people who've always said how easy it is to theme MyBB... I also wouldn't be surprised if plugins have been similarly revamped. The level of change they've done is significant - as someone who's gone through a similar journey, I can attest for the level of overhaul they've done it's many, many hours of work. Thing 2: 'when are we done' One of the hardest parts of this whole silly sordid game of software dev is knowing 'when are we done'. How much work is required to justify the next release? A commercial thing I did a few years ago was essentially internally referred to as "Site 2.0". The platform they were on, they were a few major versions behind (but crucially, still in support) and 2.0 was supposed to just be 'update to the latest version with a shiny new theme' which would also unroll some of the custom dev done because core had added some of the functionality in the meantime, e.g. instead of a weird-ass homebrew mobile app, there was now an official one that could be branded etc. The key word was 'supposed to' since after we'd put in the nearly 2 years of dev to actually do the upgrade, the client suddenly felt that 'Site 2.0' wasn't a big enough upgrade to justify the 2.0 branding. Cue more dev. SMF had a related and more practically applicable problem: in absence of a lead developer with a clear central vision for the trajectory of the project (the classical BDFL role), no-one could decide on or agree when it had enough features yet. This translated to a void of 'but is it done yet' with essentially the answer 'we don't know' because you can't know if you reached where you were going if you don't know where it is. MyBB's plan for 1.9 seems to have been a radical overhaul of building themes and extensions, plus a responsive theme - but I can't find any clear advice on what else the release could be or should be. This is important because while it's all very lovely seeing what they're doing (and, I'm watching SMF 3.0 go down its parallel track here) to improve the developer experience and in theory make it easier/better for third party dev to be done, there are two really huge issues with this. Firstly, whether this change genuinely will improve the developer experience is very much up for debate. Part of what drove MyBB's appeal is that it was easy to customise... but this new setup requires some learning and adapting to port existing themes across meaning that 1.8 to 1.9 is not a trivial upgrade if it is what it seems to be. Secondly, if you're now faced with upgrading from 1.8 to 1.9 and all you get for it is 'yay I need to redo my entire theme and all my add-ons because that's not how they're done now', you're going to ask what the point is. Users don't like having to retread things like that even if they're objectively better for it. Even porting an existing theme from an existing version, across to a new version is usually not as good as a theme built for the new version - at least when crossing the responsive divide, because older themes tended to have more visual elements that just end up fighting with the responsive changes. It's not for nothing that if you look at SMF 1.1 themes compared to 2.0 compared to 2.1 you see much more visually interesting themes back in the day. So for my money there needs to be a compelling reason to update, a reason to actually take the time and effort to upgrade because you'll get something out of it that doesn't just feel like it's something new - seemingly for the sake of something new. Not to mention now you've upended all theme dev, the question in the corner about backwards compatibility starts to rear its ugly head... because there will be people who won't care about the complexities of something like responsive and just want their old theme and plugins to work - but now you're on the pain train of dealing with upgrades, and chances are some plugins that you might have relied upon before are no longer updated because their authors have moved on, a problem SMF is still grappling with (and with no apparent long term solution in sight) I fear SMF 3.0 is in this camp having done a truly massive rework of the internal code for a difference few users will ever notice (though the devs absolutely will and now it's 'modern'). I'm not sure MyBB isn't making the same misstep here, but I could be wrong.

That didn't stop Facebook making a march on very much “not its demographic” for the longest time, but more concerningly if we concentrate on our demographic, it’s guaranteed to be shrinking rather than growing. Gotta get the young’uns hooked the way we were.

This has been there since 2007. But it’s only now it’s being weaponised.

I’m not running on anything exotic, it’s PHP 8.3 with MySQL and Apache. The issue I had was that it was trying to look up friendly URLs in the database before anything had installed which seems to me to be a bug somewhere…

Reddit’s categorisation is really nothing different to a forum without boards. A subreddit is, functionally, a board and you can just post in that without any more effort. But as for being better organised, I have to strongly disagree - since the WordPress drama I’ve been a regular lurker on r/WordPress, and I find everything about Reddit a chaotic sprawling mess. Organising by “hot” by default is unhelpful, the nesting showing you a couple of levels but then forcing you to a new page for deeper levels is inconsistent, and good luck finding anything in there after a bit. As for Discourse, categories along the side is hardly a new idea (then again Discourse is also a decade old at this point), and for some types of site it can work. Search being better is primarily a function of Discourse’s subtle behaviours encouraging you to stay on topic, with short topics, rather than the technology (Postgres FTS isn’t light years ahead of MySQL’s and the rest of the software being in Ruby doesn’t change that. Honestly most of its “enterprise adoption” is really a function of extreme declutter of the interface and repackaging the experience with infinite scroll. Having a pseudo celebrity run it doesn’t hurt either (it’s founded by the guy who co-founded Stack Overflow)

Sarcasm doesn’t translate well in pure text. ;)

I really enjoyed setting up my test site last night. Something about the IPS install process is broken - both 4.7 and 5.0 failed to install cleanly as per their instructions, dying with an error deep in the bowels of friendly URLs which clearly won’t work until the site has been installed. Unfortunately I wasn’t even getting to the “you have met the requirements” screen before it died trying to load a database connection. I fixed it by installing a fresh 4.7, running into the same bug, patching the 4.7 to bypass loading friendly URLs, then upgrading to 5.0. I dunno. Something about seeing it in front of me rather than in shiny videos feels underwhelming somehow (laughs)

Live topics, the real time trending stuff, courses - those are the big ones. I know Zapier got included when it was originally slated for cloud only, and I'm not sure off hand about the AI stuff (e.g. AI image detection) Just downloading IC 5 beta now to take a look if anything else is missing. These things are not important to everyone but I know for some folks they are make-or-break functionality (especially courses)

I'm looking for a theme designer. I don't care which platform they design for currently, since I'm really looking for a design that doesn't fit an existing platform, and whatever platform they habitually design for should be fine - porting it from another platform is no concern to me, but we are talking about a forum. Overall I'm looking for a modern light/dark theme, ideally with not everything being flat - I'd like something ideally that lands in the category of 'timeless classic' if that makes sense. Colours, I'm not wedded to a palette, but I could see modest blues working, I could even see earthy browns with a lush green accent working. Something with neutral-to-positive vibes but without being too prescriptive on design elements. I'm being vague because I don't have solid answers for some of the obvious questions yet, which is why I'm trying to find out who people generally recommend as an opening position.

That’s kind of an indictment really that no service provider has managed to get to where we were, what, 15 years ago?

How much memory is it using? Are there any signs in the log that it's the system killing it due to memory consumption? (this is a common issue with ES, as above)

SquareSpace, Fiverr and Guild Wars 2 all have Invision Community sites. These three entities are the three big examples I put out: they all absolutely have the in-house ability to build out such services themselves (and indeed ArenaNet did for the longest time), but they don’t, they outsource it. I don’t spend much time on the first two but the third I have, and there’s not really a lot that’s unique about it. I imagine getting a modern system that they don’t have to put the effort into maintaining goes a long way. I don’t know if they rolled the SSO with the main ANet services or whether they got Invision to do it for them (since the bigger cloud plans get dev too), or even if it’s self hosted or not (hard to tell, and I don’t care enough to figure it out) From the various vague hints Matt M has dropped over the last few years it is clear that their target is bigger corps who just want it primarily SaaS and not have to manage their own infrastructure because it’s cheaper to outsource that. It reminds me of when I used to work for a company that did Moodle hosting - this is something you could do yourself for sure (and I used to work with unis that didn’t just host Moodle, they had devs on staff doing Moodle customisation) and they still turned it over to us to manage the hosting because it was cheaper and easier than them doing it. For the hobbyist arena, IC doesn’t fly much any more owing to its price tag, which is very much in the prosumer tier if we’re being charitable, but the whole aim they sell it as is “we run the site so you can get on running your community”.

I don’t need an excuse myself, but I think you overestimate the average technical skill of a forum admin. I know a number of admins who would otherwise fail to install XF on regular hosting - and I don’t mean for technical reasons, but things like “how do I put the database configuration in” (or even “what’s a database”) Let me put it another way: I work for a digital agency. We literally build websites as a day job. Of the 4 of us who actively get in and do the technical stuff, I’d credit only two of us with the skill to get an unmanaged VPS up in reasonable time. After all it’s not for nothing that services like Cloudways exist to make it easier to manage. Or Laravel Forge for that matter. The number of people who want to get involved in that is much lower than we want to admit and the number of admins who couldn’t care less and just want it to work without having to get in and manage it is honestly higher than you’d imagine. There is a reason why Jcink and ProBoards still get new sites and new users in spite of the service offering being, charitably saying, behind the times. It’s also one reason Invision Community’s cloud offering in particular has traction, but also services like Circle. The great myth of Web 1.0 that Web 2,0 demonstrated is that as much as people want control over the data and the choice to customise it, they will very often trade it out for the convenience of not having to manage it - it’s why aside from the footfall that FB Groups remain popular - because it requires no cost and no technical management effort.

The flip side of course is that if you don’t have categories, it’s far harder to organise anything in case you want to come back to it later. Google is an option but only if your content is public, and of course that won’t always be true. Boards often also form the boundary within a forum in terms of visibility and security - having private vs public boards. The other problem is that Google has been able to funnel thousands and thousands of developer hours at doing cool things with search, and we haven’t. I sometimes wonder if a coalition of forum platform devs would ever achieve anything to pool our collective knowledge but even then it’s only a bucket against an ocean, versus a droplet or two. Though there are things that are interesting on the horizon - I suspect AI, carefully curated and trained, might be able to do something with improving forum search and perhaps even suggesting categories so that users don’t have to pick one but the platform itself selects the best category for a topic from its content. Work to be done for sure but it’s an avenue to experiment in.

I’m perfectly fine organising a VPS myself (I was a happy Linode customer for nearly 17 years until the Akamai acquisition started screwing things up) but do not underestimate how many people are running XF on not a VPS. (Heck, it wasn’t that long ago I was running a site that needed a 16GB instance just for its ES, but that wasn’t a forum. I’ve spent time running sites on AWS where the hosting bill is in 5 figures per month.) If more people were on a VPS the requirements wouldn’t need to be as low as they are for PHP versions because it’d be easier for people to be more current - but the surprising majority just aren’t on a VPS.

They have something forums don’t, the same thing social media doesn’t. They don’t make you put your topic in a category. Yes, you have to put it in a subreddit or a Quora space, but that’s essentially the same as putting it on a specific site rather than being on a site (=subreddit) and then having to pick a category. I continue to wonder if our adherence to structure and categorisation (for archival benefit, ultimately, in theory) is in fact hurting our cause. In fact for the one site I still have, I’ve debated cutting all the boards down to one and just using prefixes for lower friction.

Given how many people are running on XF not on a VPS, that’s not low tier. In any case, ES eats RAM like Smarties, check how much RAM it’s already using - I remember having to fight with it on Docker just to not fall over when Docker wouldn’t immediately give it 4GB just to start up (that was a few years ago now)