I would just like to post something about future of our forums. As discussed at the meeting we are looking to freshen up our forum a bit. I know people don’t always like change but this is what we are moving to but I think this will be great. I’m going to move us to Discourse forum software.
If you are pressed for time please move to the bottom of the post and read the How to prepare section.
Features The most important feature is that others have found a large increase in the quality and quantity of good discussions after setting this up.
Other features:
[ul]
[li]This forum software is 100% free, open source and extendible.[/li]
[li]No pagination (smooths croll down a thread)[/li]
[li]Dynamic notifications (get notified in your browser of new replies)[/li]
[li]Simple and clean layout and usage[/li]
[li]Made for mobile and touch. So will appear cleanly on a mobile browser[/li]
[li]Expanding links. Post a youtube video and it will auto embed. Post a link to wikipedia and it will include a summary of the article etc.[/li]
[li]Reply while you read. You can type a post while reading other threads and posts. Also easily select and quote paragraphs etc.[/li]
[li]Shows you popular links and threads with click counts etc.[/li]
[li]Real time updates means threads will update as others post to them.[/li]
[li]Remembers where you were in a thread[/li]
[li]Good search[/li]
[li]Automation in any aspects[/li]
[li]Badges that can be customised and automated.[/li]
[li]Email replies (i.e. reply to email notifications to post)[/li]
[/ul]
We will transfer the whole existing forum to the new forum including posts and user data. Private messages may be lost. Passwords may need to be reset.
[SIZE=3]How to prepare
[/SIZE]
[ul]
[li][SIZE=3]Try it out[/SIZE][/li]
[li][SIZE=3]Make sure the email you have used to register your account on this (the old) forum is up to date and active (you may need to reset password before being able to use the new forum)[/SIZE][/li]
[li][SIZE=3]Make sure that you keep a copy of all your pms that you need outside the forum as we may lose those.[/SIZE][/li]
[/ul]
There is also a reason why a lot big sites are also running away from Vbulletin…
The people who developed it, is no longer in charge of VBulletin, they have actually ventured into new software.
Vbulletin has fallen behind in terms of efficiency, innovation and most importantly security. Other software is also mostly more customisable and easier to work on.
Well from my point of view:
[ul]
[li]The conversation is first and the badge and trust system all works to promote quality conversation. This is the BIGGEST feature.[/li]
[li]Mobile first development, so everything is more mobile friendly. Don’t need tapatalk at all. Though they are working on a tapatalk plugin.[/li]
[li]From a new new user it’s cool. If you are coming from someone who knows vbulletin from other forums that’s of course not the same but if you don’t know forums this is far easier to learn.[/li]
[li]It’s more modern.[/li]
[li]We can develop badges etc tthats in line with our goals. Imagine a badge for people who do their wind stuff. etc.[/li]
[li]It pushes engagement and we want people more engageed.[/li]
[/ul]
I forgot to mention that the main reason for reconsidering options now is that we have to move this in any case. So to move is already effort. So good time to reconsider options.
Coming from someone who has done the core site and application move from Carpo to Gravity originally, I can say that moving Vbulletin is effortless. It is literally a file and sql dump and move. There are far more complex things to move.
That said, we’re supposed to be a research network, so onward and upward comms!
Fixing network monitoring is on the cards after gravity is off. I can’t do network monitoring from a server that can’t do more work. Also the forums may be working but they may well work a lot better going forward. I’d really like the forums to be more popular than othrr soapboxes out there.
Dia, I was also at first unsure about discourse when Spin showed it to me. Was like…but why!
Then I had to use discourse forums for some other project I had issues with, and was like, ok this is not so bad.
The interface is pretty cool once you start looking at it.
There is categories to sort things like you used to sub-forums or sections on vbulletin.
Our current vBulletin do look horrible, and there are far better themes out there. If we were to stay with vBulletin, I would at least hope that we can change the theme to something that Phoronix is using: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/
minus all the ads plastered all over of-coarse.
The other thing is, more and more people are moving to mobile, some platforms not even supported by Tapatalk, only Apple and Android is, which while the majority is not all of them.
That said, personally I am 50/50 on moving to Discourse.